In the end he was a failure, but made himself rich at the expense of his community, colleagues, and shareholders.
85
I lived my childhood years in Pittsfield, MA where GE had a huge transformer operation as well as plastics division. Welch stripped the operation to the bone by shipping most jobs overseas, and reduced Pittsfield to nothingness as he later proceeded to do in Schenectady, NY and elsewhere. He also, as others have noted, left behind tons of cancer-causing PCB waste that GE refused to clean up. Welch never batted an eye through it all. His obit in the NYT doesn’t deserve all the space the editors gave it.
88
A lot of negative comments here by sanctimonious “armchair quarterbacks” who never tried, never took risk and never achieved anything. The NYT’s will not be printing any of your obituaries.
12
Jack Welch is resposible for the death of GE a once great company.
51
Want to know what socialism for the rich is? Thank you Jack for epitomizing it—
**G.E., like many large banks, tapped emergency government loans to help it get through the upheaval.**
The 1000s of brownfields and broken cities owe it all to this genius! An epitome of our failed technocratic Wall St elite.
62
Unfortunately, a big part of Welch’s enduring legacy is legions of managers who confuse meanness with management.
71
I was gong to critique Mr. Welch's career and hubris but no need due to insightful comments already made by NYT readers. I never worked for GE but was subject to "Six Sigma" training and/or philosophy at various times in my career (now retired) as peddled by consulting firms and always thought it was a big waste of resources.
38
What about his opposition to cleaning up GE's pollution of the Hudson river? Nothing much was done on that score until after he left.
43
GE under Jack Welsh disposed of hundreds of tons of PCB into the Hudson River and lied about it for years. Then he said that it was not dangerous, then he said I didn't know,
then he said GE will not pay for the cleanup, then he said its all cleaned up; one lie after another. So yes he was a hero to all the other CEO's all through out the country that were dumping there dangerous and lethal
waste into the waters. land and air of our beautiful country. Countless lives
and families where destroyed by this man and his company.
59
I was disappointed to hear the lavish praise for Welch from Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News last night. Disappointed, but not surprised.
36
The business press of the era heaped endless praise on Welch. Fawning, uncriticall coverage by Forbes, Business Week, the WSJ, Fortune depicted this clever, arrogant fraudster as a hero and a genius. Hope current editors of those publications have transcended the herd instinct that turned Welch into a media darling as he was undermining GE.
31
Welch looted the General Electric corporation out of nearly 3/4 of a Billion Dollars while leading the deindustrialization of our country.
Welch and his successor Imelt ruined Thomas Edisons company.
45
Steve Lohr and other way-too-young to remember the 80s cable casters have no idea what Welch did; that is rob the GE bank. He was paid millions to get out of GE. Shameless handoff of the GE's fired staff (1/4 of the employees) made for the company.
27
Jack Welch took a great American manufacturing co.
turned it into a bank and destroyed it. That's it.
89
Jack Welch at G.E., “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap at Sunbeam, T. Boone Pickens at Gulf, amongst others, who believed wrongly that a CEO owed responsibility only to shareholders. Yikes.
71
Mr. Welch is probably the most over-rated business executive I can think of. His time at the helm of G.E. coincided with a business and regulatory environment in which a company with the resources and standing of G.E. could hardly avoid substantial revenue growth and stock appreciation. His simplistic policy of culling the least effective 10% from the management ranks meant the knives were perpetually deployed while those at risk wasted untold energy trying to avoid being tagged in that group. Of course, Mr. Welch himself was above such plebeian concerns.
Congratulations, Jack: You got yours.
65
"Manager of the century"? - perhaps, but certainly not this century.
36
Jack Welch epitomized the corporate greed that has taken over this country. He was a cheerleader for management styles that destroyed this country's productivity and left thousands of people unemployed in pursuit of the holy dollar.
So did he take all his millions of dollars with him? Most certainly not. So what did his management style do to help this country prevail over foreign competition? Nothing.
He will not be missed.
62
This year, we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth. You can be sure that there will be no such celebration for Jack Welsh. He has already been cast into the ash heap of history.
49
Mr Welch was a vastly over rated executive whose financial businesses bordered on fraud from an accounting standpoint. Worse, his lap dog BOD were some of the pioneers in using corporate treasury stock as a means to compensate executives for doing their jobs. For the uninitiated, that means diluting the capital base of the corporation and the shareholders by awarding capital to risk averse executives; "risk averse" in the sense that they would never risk their own money to buy their own corporate stock. It was awarded freely by their BODs.
The utter failure of GE post Welch and the utter failure of his chosen successors both within GE and as CEOs of other corporations is testimony to the con Mr Welch pulled off.
56
Such an interesting leader. Back in the olden-days when huge companies had to have leaders with many skill sets and bold and decisive personalities. Today it's just a dude with an idea and a unicorn investor and then it's swallowed up by google and voila one billionaire, virtually nothing done for society, a handful of jobs created and . . .so what. These old school guys (they were guys, let's not make that the point) had to make no small plans, manage tens of thousands of employees, move in and out of industries, learn to operate globally and all without computers. Just using their brains and great teams. They do not make 'em like that anymore and more's the pity.
A full life well lived. RIP.
3
I think Welsh's stature as a business superstar will diminish as time goes by. General Electric was a Nova that burned brightly while he was at the center calling the shots but soon flamed out as most conglomerates do. It happened to LTV in the 60's, IT&T in the 80's and GE in this century.
Immelt who Welch chose to lead the company didn't know what to do with all the moving parts that Neutron Jack had assembeled in Finance and badly timed entries into the oil business.
He left his wife for a younger woman just like Bill Agee of Bendix did in the 80's with Mary Cunningham. Like the weary cop at the scene of a grisly murder or car accident says. " Keep on moving folks, nothing to see here."
I suspect in the next 5 years GE will be bought up by another large company and those parts that dont fit will be sold or spun off. People will utter "GE WIZ What Happened ? "
I really believe that Welch could see what a house of cards he had created and wanted out while his Platinum and Diamond parachute would stay open and his libido was still stong.
This case is one in which like Wells Fargo that the company should clawback whatever funds were not legally earned.
23
Welch was lauded in the business trades in the 1980s and 90s for his "10% rule," and the practice was repeated by executives in industries like banking, supply chain/distribution, etc. Look up Roman decimation for a strikingly analogous practice. As many of the commenters may have also experienced first hand, watching scores of senior managers viciously claw each other to shreds to avoid the cut zone is one of the most sickening experiences you'll ever have in corporate life. Thanks Jack.
40
Jack Welch turned GE into an investment bank so he could raise money and gamble with it in the run up to the financial crisis. Like many Wall Street firms and other financial services industry corporations, GE made money hand over fist, while ignoring its core business. Then it all came crashing down. Jack Welch retired with a golden parachute and started a lucrative consulting company. GE has really never recovered, though it has returned to its core businesses.
25
I love how the human mind always gives so much credit to a CEO, General, President, and so on and gives so little attention to all the folks who worked so hard in a organization to make it possible.
28
Jack Welch, like all managers, is/was of the times. There's no arguing what happened at GE during his tenure. Morality aside, profits at GE went hyperbolic. He sliced and diced, wheeled and dealed, and did whatever it took to create those profits; and, he did so within the business/regulatory climate of the day.
In retrospect, did Welch build a house of cards? Given what GE is today, yes! But, one has to wonder: would a young Jack Welch know what to do with GE today, in these times, in the business climate of today? Would he be able to rebuild it, to restore it to hyperbolic profitability? Would he still be a "manager of the century?"
Welch could not have done what he did without the Reagan administration policies that created the house of cards economy that had its long-term effect in the 2007/8 Great Recession. Welch was of the times, and he knew how to play it, for better or worse.
16
My company had bought GE turbines for decades at our plants. After the last 15 years of product failures and poor performance, ineffective project management and a complete lack of accountability, we issued a corporate edict that we would never buy another GE turbine. And GE's service of its own products was so bad that we've found other people do a better job performing maintenance on GE turbines than GE does. So we don't even let GE do work on their own turbines anymore!
Is GE's current terrible turbine business Jack Welch's fault? No. But by creating a culture that focused only on dollars at all times, Welch eliminated all loyalty of the company to the employee and, in time, the employee to the company. This led to unmotivated employees not caring about the company's customers. GE's once-revered reputation with customers is gone and it is never coming back. The company should be broken up and its assets sold to people who actually want to run businesses and serve customers.
Welsh's model had a shelf life that lasted about as long as he was CEO. He made a lot of money for himself while it lasted. A lot of GE employees, customers and shareholders have lost a lot more in the time since he left.
38
Jack Welch did not invent corporate greed. However he made it mainstream and became the touchstone for many other CEO's of large corporations. I became part of GE in 2002, when they purchased my employer. Thankfully by that time, Jeff Immelt was at the helm the toxic business culture created by Welch had mostly dissipated. I enjoyed my many years of service in IT management within GE. The culture had moved on from to toxic to inclusive.
I find it uplifting to read the generally negative consensus regarding Welch's ruthless legacy. It is well deserved.
26
After spending 50 years in the employ of corporations, I came to believe that the best measure of a CEO is what happens after she or he leaves. Mr. Welch’s contrails are self evident.
53
@David Mack
Absolutely spot on. Welch set the stage for Immelt. It was all financial engineering and public relations under Jack and Wall Street loved it. GE used its reinsurance business and internal business dealings to manage the revenue it reported. Sarbanes-Oxley put an end to much of that and the stock dropped like a rock.
15
I grew up with GE products and always found them to be of good value and quality. Once Welch started with his focus on shareholder value you could see that they declined in quality or other brands just became more competitive because they invested in research and development, not creating a financial arm like GE Capital.
He advocated for excessive CEO pay that went from 40 times the average employee to over 300 times. When GE was fined for defrauding the Pentagon and despoiling the Hudson River it made many more jaundiced about corporations as much as when books like The Hidden persuaders and Organizational man became popular in the 50’s. There’s no need to wonder why the term socialist has less of the ugly resonance than it did during his heyday.
As far as the Hudson River is concerned. It took all of the folks Welch hated: environmental groups. A Kennedy, a moderate Republican and Pete Seeger to get it cleaned up.
Over the past 40 years it is amazing how his managerial methods, however ineffective and destructive took hold in society.
In 2005 I was at a mayoral forum when none other than candidate Anthony Weiner said that we need to apply Jack Welch methodology ie get rid of the lowest performing 10% of employees and agencies to government every few years. I thought to myself what an insane idea. So if there are fewer fires you get rid of 10% of the fire department. Brilliant!
44
@Merrill R. Frank I guess most people advocating to get rid of the lowest performing 10% don´t see themselves as being a part of this group. It is an insane thinking.
10
Jack Welch was not interested in "production" enough to discover for himself methods of W Edwards Deming, that had been in Industrial/Manufacturing Engineering books for years. He became aware of it when examining why Japan became a Manufacturing Leader when they embraced Deming's ideas.
Jack Welch's application of Six Sigma at GE is more correctly described as Sick Sigma.
19
Jack Welch is the CEO who killed GE.
Not right away - it survived for years after he retired. But he certainly killed it by making it an almost-bank. He focussed on Wall Street to the exclusion of products - his product was lending money.
I worked there for 20+ years and for the last ten the workforce shrank once or twice a year.
Now there's not much left except for the shell. What a fiasco his "leadership" was.
62
@Peter
My analogy for what Jack did is this. Say you had a blood bank business. People sell you their blood and you resell it to hospitals. And say you can safely give 1 pint of blood out of your 1.5 gallons each year without causing additional internal complications.
But you need to grow the business. One way to increase your revenue is to take the full 1.5 gallons. However, that would leave you with no revenue for next year. The business would be essentially liquidated (no pun intended).
Alternatively, instead of taking 1 pint, let's take 3 pints. The supplier doesn't die at once though there will be long term complications and the supplier will ultimately die. But these are long term problems to be left for the next person who runs business.
Welch made his name by extracting the intrinsic value of the various business that were in GE. He never created a business.
6
I remember the American corporate management attitudinal shift in the 1970's well. It was not a positive change.
There was a new element of cutthroat management for profit even pitting internal company units against each other. There was lack of professionalism in not living up to even previous quality or ethical standards. And there was a new ruthlessness with employees. It happened at the local GE , but also other companies. Instead of giving employees great benefits to keep unions out, the employees were seen as the problem--not motivated to produce quality. Machines and robotics were preferred. Edward Deming destroyed that notion with the Japanese quality circle successes with the quality inexpensive Japanese cars, electronics and cameras.
The pride of the American engineers and scientists in their great achievements in pharmaceuticals, appliances, electronics, etc. was destroyed by bringing in the MBAs who denigrated the very creative talent that were needed to produce products for the future.
Unfortunately most of the business press and younger generation of managers swallowed this terrible strategy and praised it at the time. The people that had to live through it and watch communities and companies die, knew it was wrong from the beginning. Greed is never good for anybody, including Welch or Milken.
54
Jack Welch emphasized maximizing shareholder value, price per share, at the expense within his "diversified conglomerate" of ignoring the construction of sustainable competitive advantage within its business units.
His lack of allegiance to business units, markets, customers, and employees made it easy to trade companies and business units like poker chips.
Nevertheless, that is also why the house of cards collapsed. His actual strategies were not strategies at all. They were simply the convenience of trading tactics, the buying and selling of profit centers based on short term expectations, or losses, compared to something Homer Simpson might call "sparkly and shiny" and which Welch might consider the "new future". Others might call that gambling.
By definition, there was an absence of sustainable competitive advantage since the house of cards collapsed.
What remains unseen are the political ties between Washington power centers and the industry alliances so prominent from the 1980's up through today. There is more than one other General Electric story out there not yet written.
28
@mumbogumbo
Terrific analysis. Welch was a transactional leader, much like our current president. No core values or vision with which to anchor strategy.
8
I read the stories in the NYT's, Wall street Journal and Washington Post on Jack Welch's death. As someone who enjoys reading reader comments, I can honesty say I have never seen so many universally negative comments about an individual, let alone one who died. Career politicians of both parties should take note that the general public is very tired of people who got us to the mess we are in today.
70
Mr Welch was a key leader in the financialization of American business which lead to the hallowing out of the middle class, the destruction of manufacturing in America and eventually as a result of the Great Recession, to the incredible value destruction of General Electric. Job not well done!
36
The Hudson and the Housatonic Rivers are still being dredged for PCB toxins that Welch poured into them, rather than pay for proper disposal. It’s a shameful legacy.
37
@David
Welch opposed the clean-up, but the dumping of the PCB contaminated water occurred between 1947 and 1977 well before his time
3
He was the Gordon Geko of multinationals. As Gordon famously said - Lunch is for whimps. He drove GE’s numbers for Wall Street but he cut innovation and R&D and their product line turned into what is is today - lagging.
27
My dad worked as a research chemist in the lighting division of GE's "NELA Park" campus for nearly 40 years. After he'd retired, when my mom had a stroke, GE's insurance denied her claim -- Dad got on the phone, and eventually got right to the top. Jack Welch personally approved the claim.Whatever he was on the corporate level, he was a genuinely good man.
8
@Russell Potter ... Finally, a comment saying Jack Welch was "a genuinely good man." Thank you Mr. Potter.
1
Based in California I worked at GE Capital as an auditor from 1990-2000, working 55 hours a week, and never receiving a dime of overtime(in violation of California labor law).
My salary ranged from $20,000-$37,000, and travel expenses were spartan: I once got criticized for putting a $5 stapler on my expense account.
When Welch had his heart problems he got Platinum medical care. My heart issues resulted in GE hounding my doctors to get me off disability. I believe this shortchanged my medical care.
Jack's relentless drive for profits turned otherwise decent lower-level managers into unfeeling tools.
I saw many high performing employees sacked: incredibly, one had only two weeks earlier recovered $1M for the company.
GE would not pay for my computer training: I paid $1K out of my pocket for a year's training at CompUSA.
43
It’s a rare occasion when someone dies and there isn’t a single positive comment made about them. Not a one. Was it all worth it Mr. Welch?
51
A media creation who engaged in very Creative Accounting
41
Really? So many lost their jobs! And GE is nothing now! He was a greedy person and if you that’s great, well I don’t know!
50
What a lovely paean to corporate raiding! Jack Welch's policies despoiled my home and left us with a dirty river that delivers cancer as it goes down stream. Nice legacy.
62
Jack Welch never received a "severance payment." That's what you give to someone you are firing (a point made later in the article). He did receive a generous retirement payout (how much of that was contractual or deferred compensation I doubt we'll ever know). But he never, ever got a "severance" payment, as much as those who did wish that he had.
15
After reading the comments on this article you would have thought they worked for and got pink slips from Jack.Not much sentiment for Jack,the nuns would be reviewing their work product and see where they come up short on instilling decency.
4
Jack Welch was a plague indeed American business. Why would ANYBODY not slam him?
42
It is interesting how much Jack stressed integrity... how many times did he get divorced for infidelity?
57
Yes
Manager is correct; he was anything but a leader.
27
GE was one of the top US companies with billions of dollars in offshore profits not repatriated!
25
90% of success is timing.
9
And look at GE now -- a husk of its former self. Welch's tunnel vision of stock holders led to GE investments, which led to disaster in 2008 from which GE never recovered. Not to mention over 100,000 employees let go. GE, once a company of great American innovation, driven into the ground by the bruin of ruin.
68
It appears from the article that Mr. Welch followed the Ayn Rand model for business that so many Republicans admire.
It strikes me as curious that Mr. Welch made his ascent after President Reagan, the G.E. spokesperson for many years, was elected.
44
Despite his death and the strong belief to leave aside complaints of the dead, he's an easy target to dislike. He championed business philosophies that have been practiced by many following his example and fabulous success. Like many big corporations, he found it easier to make money in the financial sector rather than in the manufacturing sector. He believed that the manager didn't need to know the business they are in. He ruthlessly culled people judged in the lower end of his performance ladders. His use of GE as his own piggy bank for outrageous luxuries despite his own personal wealth is really reprehensible.
45
Ah, the 80s!
Milliken, Boesky, Hemsleys, Ebers, Enron/Kenny Lay, RJR/Johnson, Chainsaw Al, Junk Bonds, "Greed is Good"...
I am starting to feel nostalgia, all over again!
51
Some of his hand-picked deputies went on to run companies like Home Depot and Boeing!!
17
the former General Electric executive who took over at Home Depot did not last very long there
24
@DC
That exec made a total mess of Home Depot; took years to straighten it out and to lure customers back.
18
@Jay. Yes, we can see the results of the Welch alumni who have been running Boeing! I believe that their mismanagement has caused over 360 deaths with the two MAX-737 crashes.
9
He also selected Jeff Immelt as his successor, perhaps one of the worst decisions of his career.
36
Welch seems to have been a master rent seeker: the art of extracting value from the economy without producing any. His strategies were much copied:
Outsourcing, utilize cheap foreign workers to cut labor costs.
Merge, merge and merge some more. Buy up the competition. Get your acquisitions to take on huge debt levels and then cast them of, discharging the debt in bankruptcy court.
Tax avoidance. Employ an army of tax lawyers to take advantage of every loophole.
Finance. So many opportunities in finance to make money with smoke and mirrors.
Executive compensation. What a scam. In twenty years the typical CEO pay package went from about 100 times the baseline worker's pay to several hundred times.
I'm glad that some people have caught on to all this. Unfortunately, there are many democrats who still don't have a clue. As long as we have abortion and LGBT rights, they're satisfied.
24
@JFC What on earth does your last paragraph have to do with Jack leading the movement of republican greed? You sound very confused.
18
@Ethics 101
It means that democrats who know nothing of Welch will vote for a candidate who supports LGBT and abortion rights, but may not punish corporate greed the way it should be.
3
After the second divorce disclosures I just wrote him off as another white collar crook... I bet Donald Trump worshipped the idea of having your stockholders and workers pay for everything from ultra expensive dining, housing, flowers, transportation and even the toilet paper.
41
GE Market Cap
August 2000 - $594 billion
March 2020 - $94 billion
Tesla Market Cap
August 2000 - $0
March 2020 - $137 billion
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. -- Jack Welch
19
Tesla market cap is a mirage until we see sustainable profitability.
16
@Mark
Tesla Market cap
2025 - $0
11
@Victor @PM
You could be right about Tesla's future market cap but even VW CEO Herbert Diess says "the time of the traditional car manufacturers is over" for which Tesla deserves tremendous credit. GE could have played a major role in this sector. Instead, they traded their birthright in for a huge stake in financial services which was not their core business and relentlessly drove what was once one of the world's leading manufacturers into the abyss.
4
How's GE been doing these days? While I'm sure Mr. Welch would deny any responsibility beyond his very last quarter, since the quarter is all that counts to him, GE's stock trades at less than 20% of its peak in the early 2000s. And it may be endangered by tens of billions of dollars of debt it's been using to goose its share price.
Jack Welch ran this company as his own private piggy bank, and retired with still insane benefits from the company. He planted the seeds for GE's demise. And the fact that people have wanted to lionize him all these years has planted the seeds for our current problems with inequality.
I don't think his passing is such bad news, and a lot of people's lives would be going better if it had happened sooner.
156
The best parody of Welch is done on 30 Rock by Alec Baldwin who plays Jack Donaghy the East Coast TV and Microwave Oven Programming VP for GE.
Baldwin plays it like no one else and if you've never watched this gem of a show (created and staring Tina Fey) you must! It will have you laughing at the absurdity of what Welch and his minions did to GE and Baldwin, the writers, the actors and the guests are superb! Even the show's theme music is terrific!
33
Jack Welch. An early champion of the one and only purpose of business is to increase stockholders profits school.
A corporation owes nothing to it's employees. Nor the districts they operate in. Or the nation. That provided GE with the educated work force, security, infrastructure and good will needed to be profitable.
Their only debt to society was to pay their taxes.
Which they were able to avoid anyhow by clever use of the tax laws.
To Jack and all his followers, thanks.
55
Sold our last business to GE and watched that horrible culture destroy a great company. Customers and employees last, quarterly numbers first. It took 10 years but that company is a shell of itself thanks to GE culture.
56
Corporations used to invest in their products, people, and communities. They played the long game—building the business for long term profit... then Welch came along
47
Can you really play the long game any more though? Or does the world change too fast?
Welch and those like him are one of the underlying reasons for the popularity of Bernie Saunders,
I wonder what Trumph will Tweet about his passing. Like Welch a narcissistic , money loving womanizer. It is said that not a few corporate leaders are charming and intelligent sociopaths.
35
For a little perspective. Read Thomas O'Boyle's book entitled, 'At Any Cost, Jack Welch, General Electric and the Pursuit of Profit.'. Eye opening.
18
He spent two decades sucking the marrow out of one of America’s most innovative and established companies and pumping up the stock value for short term investors. When he left, he left a carcass.
50
Jack wrote many books but if you worked for GE as I did for 40 years you could sum up how to have a successful GE career in two sentences: A) Meet and exceed your assigned metrics no matter how far they are disconnected from reality B) Forget about the customer, the product or your colleges, your only mission is to impress your direct manager. How? See ‘A’ above.
76
@Bill Carson
Sounds like the mantra of Liberty Mutual Insurance whose corporate office bragged in company wide emails to all employees about the massive profits they were making, large sums being spent on golden parachutes for departing senior executives, and the millions being spent on remodeling the new executives offices. All while they were cutting the field workforce (worker bees) and acquiring more and more of the competition, taking on more middle managers than needed, who in turn came up with every new metric under the sun and moon to try and quantify their position. Field workers had to prioritize meeting the metrics over serving the paying customers. Several employees either were so stressed out they literally had heart attacks and died (of which Liberty tried to get out of paying out the life insurance to the wife and young children), had to leave after 20 or more years due to severe incapacitating stress or were forced out with bogus relocation's only to be let go after they had sold homes they were financially stable in to buy and/or rent in much higher markets leaving them financially destitute. Most ended up divorced and suffering with severe health issues.
8
The Welch style was the ultimate in "eating one's seed corn". He basically made short term decisions for short term profitability which eviscerated GE R&D, thus hollowing out the company. Unfortunately, his mindless MBA bean counter pattern was emulated at a lot of once great companies.
63
Has anyone estimated the governmental and charitable costs of assisting fired G.E. employees while Welch grew profits five times? For whom was he the manager of the century?
40
Republicans that’s who. They worship him.
20
Thanks to Welch, companies like Clorox still stack rank their employees.
10
anyone who thinks working at Clorox constitutes a career probably deserves that! ;-)
5
Jack Welch was a glorified clerk. Welch was an entertaining self- promoting mythical media maven. Welch was a corrupt crony capitalist corporate plutocrat oligarch. Welch was a gilded age robber baron malefactor of great wealth.
Welch didn't discover nor invent anything lasting nor meaningful.
Welch was no Jeff Bezos nor Mark Zuckerberg nor Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates nor Warren Buffet.
Welch calls to mind the cliche ' a jack of all trades but a master of none'.
Managing people in a business is about more than finance, profits and returns.
Shareholders and managers are not the makers of products nor the counters of numbers nor the masters of quality.
Corporations are not people. Money is not speech.
59
@John Zotto
General Electric wasn't Jack Welch's idea nor invention.
Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates and Buffet had ideas and visions.
So did Fred Smith of Federal Express.
Buffet has asked Gates to help give away his fortune. Buffet invested in existing businesses companies that had products that he knew and understood.
4
You forgot the joke
A neutron bomb eliminates the humans but leaves the buildings standing....
20
Wasn't there a NYT Magazine cover story on the lack of diversity of the GE managers under Welch?
13
This is one tyrant who will not be missed.
He turned a proud American industrial company into a financing business through series of mergers and acquisitions--notably not organic growth, which bred the seeds for the disaster during the financial crisis.
Under his management, GE lost its identity. He single-handedly turned GE into a monster virtually unmanageable by anyone else, upon his departure.
He brutally managed GE and fired a fixed percentage of employees every single year as part of the management plan.
He manipulated earnings through questionable accounting practice, in order to manage GE's stock price.
He is a loyal supporter of Donald Trump. That is quite consistent with what he did through his life as a business executive.
71
Can't help interpreting the overwhelming negativity in the comments as a sign of the times. America is so over lionizing corporate chieftans.
May the out-pouring reach a crescendo in Nov. when America gets to judge another relic (albeit an imposter) of this earlier era, Donald Trump.
43
Wow. I can't remember the last time that the comments about someone who recently died were so overwhelmingly negative. I don't mind (wanted to post some thoughts here myself, but others had the same thoughts and beat me to the posting)...but I am a bit surprised.
Glad to see that when someone who dedicated his life to the redefinition of "doing good works" to mean "make my shareholders the only people who matter because no one else does" dies, folks notice and comment appropriately.
51
I recall something about him and some case studies from a management class..
I mostly recall Jack’s accusation of President Obama cooking the books at BLS.. It’s now what I think of first.
14
@BklynNup
I also remember that weird Bureau of Labor Statistics accusation.
Jack Welch applied the motto "Imagination at Work" to financial accounting. Probably that is why he accused others of what he thought was normal.
13
No mention of Jack Welch being one of the biggest cheerleaders for offshoring jobs?
32
My most cogent memory of Welch will always be when he went on MSNBC in 2012, after positive news regarding the drop in the unemployment rate, and joined the right wing pundits who were claiming that the data was faked in order to help Obama's re-election campaign.
37
It may be unfair to judge Welch for what happened in ‘08 when he retired in ‘01. However, I’m happy to judge what he left in his wake. Still, today, hundreds of large companies are mismanaged by his 80s and 90s precepts (I’d love to find a way to get rid of Six Sigma in every business; end all use of the buzzwords “lean” and “shareholder value”). The notion of being number one or number two in your sector has indeed been discounted as a foolish way to manage a company, as has the idea of “cutting your way to profitability”. I’m sorry the author didn’t define the “neutron” title. In the 80s, weapons manufacturers had developed the neutron bomb. It reportedly killed all the people but left the buildings standing. Call your Human Resources friends to see how “rank and yank” works in their companies (Enron had a similar philosophy and, well...we see how that ended).
After ‘01, Welch traded on being “Jack Welch” man about town, cable news presence, etc. Sadly, there are still many senior managers in their late 40s and early 50s who ascribe to his discredited business management ideas.
29
The article doesn't mention one of Welch's greatest skills: the careful management of quarterly and annual earnings figures for maximum effect on the stock price.
Under Welch, GE's earnings announcements were habitually preceded by "whisper numbers" communicated by management to selected analysts. These estimates would become the Wall Street consensus for the official quarterly earnings announcement by the company. Then the company would announce results that were typically a few cents above the consensus it had crafted. This apparent (but illusory) outperformance was an ongoing feature of GE's financial reporting over many years - which enhanced the apparent safety, consistency and quality of GE's earnings stream, and the company's reputation as a desirable investment.
The trouble was that these consistently rising earnings were not what they seemed. GE routinely used financial tools to shift revenues and profits from quarter to quarter to keep up the rising trend of profit. The huge finance arm of the company, with its complex derivative and credit operations, was a convenient way to move cash around and erase earnings volatility. After Welch's departure, the SEC investigated GE's earnings practices and cracked down hard on them.
32
@Bob Diesel You forgot Welch's systematic pillaging of billions of dollars out the GE Pension plan to create his earnings myth. He put hundreds of thousands of pensioners at risk, but hey he got his $416 million parting gift.
30
It is odd Mr Welch is considered a hero about GE an organization he almost succeeded destroying by investing billions in failed real estate loans during the 2008 financial crisis. He is no hero to me as he succeeded destroying billions in shareholder value. To this day GE is not even close to have recovered from the Welch disaster
27
Comments all around the internet are consistent: he was evil and destroyed not only a great American company but the lives of thousands. If this is the face of American business, we are doomed.
39
Welch represented everything that has gone wrong in America. No ethics, no morality, no integrity, toxic masculinity and misogyny, greed beyond belief and reason, an inability to experience compassion, etc. His legacy will be like that of the Robber Barons - immense selfishness and greed.
43
If the GE way was the right way, then GE would not be selling off businesses and on the verge of bankruptcy.
Welch and his MBA financial engineering approach did nothing to promote the dominance of his business in lucrative industries while the competition ended up winning the day.
The MBA approach needs to be revisited and revised to focus on product and operational excellence, that is what your client buys, with finance only as a means of delivering on that strategy, not the core pillar to the strategy.
Welch failed his business and stock holders, failed the employees who actually made it possible, and failed the US for the destruction of a valuable US business.
36
Welch brought in the rapacious era of valuing stock prices above else. Human being were cogs in the wheel of corporate profits and nothing else. The fact that such an abhorrent individual was idolized in this country speaks volumes, and not in a good way, about our priorities.
57
"Mr. Welch was also attacked when he was leading G.E., especially for slashing the G.E. work force, which earned him the nickname “Neutron Jack.”"
Not exactly right. He got this nickname after accidentally blowing up a GE factory when he was a chemical engineer. Which is in his autobiography.
2
@Matt M Never trust anything in an autobiography.
8
@Matt M - Actually, the "Neutron Jack" nickname derives from the neutron bomb, the controversial low-yield nuclear warhead typically mounted on a cruise missile, introduced in the late 1970s. The neutron bomb eliminated anyone within its targeted range, but left the buildings standing - an apt, if crude, analogy to Jack Welch's treatment of GE workers and managers.
It's no surprise that Welch came up with less controversial version of the origin of the nickname he hated.
14
It is refreshing to read these many comments from people who have no need or desire to eulogize the most cutthroat of industry leaders.
It must be possible to make a considerable fortune and not behave like a Hun.
Rare, I know.
41
The success of GE was built on a lot of ruthless hot air pumped by Jack Welch!
GE of today is an emaciated zombie! The only one who laughed his way to the bank is Jack Welch with his half a billion dollar severance package (and we're not even talking about other accumulated assets through RSU's) and now his widow!
In the end, we'll return to the dust, empty handed!
37
One only needs to read two sentences to sum up Mr. Welch's business legacy and they also happen to reflect the problems in our country which accelerated during his reign:
"Mr. Welch received a record severance payment of $417 million when he retired in 2001."
"...made sweeping payroll cuts..."
53
Welch is the prime example of how ruthless the corporate world is, how little a dedicated and loyal workforce counts, and how misleading and transitory the rise of the market value of the firm is.
The moniker, "Neutron Jack," says it all. Eventually, not just killing off the humans but the abandoned structures are turning into dust.
29
When I read this obit I was reminded of a quote from Clarence Darrow: "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." This obit has given a host of people great pleasure.
90
I experienced GE style management with Larry Bossidy at Allied Signal (Honeywell). It was extremely cut throat . Make your numbers of you're.out. People would vanish from their offices week after week. Employees were called biological assets. Mergers led to more layoffs. Older workers were hit especially hard.
51
Welch. Greed.
45
Mr. Welch did make the stock price soar and I bought more thinking that the world's premier company would lead to a comfortable retirement with steady dividend income but Jack's last and worst decision--Jeffery Immelt--eliminated that possibility. The dividend is gone and my stake is worth 15% of what it once was
17
Welch is the one who planted and watered the seeds of General Electric's destruction.
He is the one who initiated and propagated the headlong rush into high risk loans, and monumentally foolish utilization credit swaps and borrowing.
He was gone, and his predecessor, before the chickens came home to roost.
But make no mistake.
Shareholders are paying the price for his hubris.
45
Welch was also part of a Harvard MBA groupthink that manufacturing was a second-rate business because it could never produce the kind of returns that financial services could. Making freezers and dishwashers just was so declasse for Wall Street celebrities like Jack Welch.
But for financial services to produce those returns entailed financial risk, and GE found out in a big way in 2008.
As it turns out GE's best business wasn't leasing or second mortgages or consumer credit, it was aircraft engines -- an old fashioned brick-and-mortar manufacturing business with traditional unionized American workforce.
38
Dr. Welch was one of the many CEOs who decided to financialize their industrial companies, because doing so provided quick and easy profits. Why invest in difficult long term science and engineering R&D, when you could take that money to Wall Street and show profits in months?
General Motors, Chrysler, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak went down the same road and completely lost their technological leadership as a result. One could say Boeing is on the same path today.
Microsoft pulled back from that abyss, because Bill Gates intervened and had Steve Ballmer fired/removed, as he was steering the company towards the same quick-buck financialization schemes.
Basically, whenever a technology company is taken over by the Wall Street financial types, it is The End for that company.
43
@Gabe One could add Westinghouse to the list of once great manufacturing companies who got nailed by their real estate and finance arms. Their nuclear power business was taken over by the Japanese and it to has bitten the dust.
12
History, and current GE stock/situation, have proven his amazing run was really not that amazing, and that his initiatives simply do not work in the long run. He is seen today more of a business failure than anything else.
29
It is important to remember that many of the manufacturing business Jack jettisoned in the early 1980s had been "milked" over the prior decade. Little or no investment in capital equipment for MANY years, so by the 1980s they were no longer productive and had to be done away with. Their demise was a foregone conclusion. It was great for shareholders (for about 20 years), but not for loyal GE employees in "out of the way" locations across the US. That was the start of the hollowing out of our manufacturing base.
In 1980 i was a management trainee in GE's Louisville, Kentucky appliance business. At that time Ford was advertising "quality is job 1." I always said that had GE used this "jingle" they should have replaced "1" with "100." It was not all the hourly employees' fault, but they, along with a lot of managers, paid the price.
16
A disaster who ruined (and looted) his company, although final collapse didn't happen until his successor took over.
The company grew by pasting together (acquiring) other companies so that gross revenues and profits increased, but so did the number of shares, in proportion, so there was no benefit (except to the M&A specialists). The friction between incompatible parts actually reduced shareholder value. There is a reason GE is unwinding all those acquisitions, trying to avert bankruptcy.
25
Superstar? He laid the groundwork for the company’s dubious financial engineering. You can directly trace the current state to GE to his reign and his minions that’s carried on that tradition.
27
I suspect that when all the dust settles, it will not be the '60s that prove crucial to the fortune and history of the US but the '80s, and to some extent, the '90s.
Since 1980 more money has been spent on tax cuts than on infrastructure; less enforcement and repeal of financial rules has made it easier for fewer people to accrue more wealth; less enforcement of merger/acquisitions rules have reduced the number of industrial players, and by extension, jobs; lower taxes have reduced educational and job training investment, etc.
Lessons not learned:
1: Capitalism is incapable of self-regulation. The doctrine of survival of the fittest is too strong.
2: Corporate directors have a single obligation: maximize shareholder returns.
3: Capitalism likes oligarchies and/or plutocracies.
42
extensive use of corporate aircraft and a Manhattan co-op apartment, with services like laundry and flowers, as well as dining bills....
Not to mention retaining a suite at Wimbledon upon his retirement if I am recalling correctly.
This is evidence of a great leader? Hardly.
As others have stated, most overrated business person ever. Took more value out of companies that others had created. Good riddance to his ilk, but they still lurk among us unfortunately.
30
I have an addendum to my earlier comment. My college roommate's widowed mother sang Welch's praises. Her husband headed up a division of GE and she received good returns on her GE stock. All I could say was that she would have received a larger dividend if Welch had not paid himself in the manner that he did. Whenever I hear "shareholder" value as a justification for paying outrageous executive salaries, I know that equity in the company is being diluted, i.e. stolen. And the formulation is contagious. Greed is not good.
25
@Kathryn Part of Welch's "retirement" package was the supply of fresh flowers to his apartment every day. Talk about tacky.
16
It is not nice to talk about the dead but... Jack Welch was interviewed on television while he was working at G.E. and it was very telling. He said he would fire employees at age 55 because they had reached their potential. Yet he was over 65 and still employed so I guess it did not pertain to him. How many 55 year olds can get another job and that is too young for most to take retirement. I never admired this man after hearing about how he operated. His legacy is not one in which to be proud.
47
Although I didn’t work for GE or Welch, I worked for CEO at another company who idolized Welch, and religiously followed his precepts, especially the elimination of employees to increase share value. We all had to read Jack’s books. We all had to fire solid people. We were ranked each year 1-3, with ones receiving good pay packages, twos told to improve, and threes shown the door. And each year, it did not matter what you had done long-term for the company, or what value might be around the corner. If you scored a one that year, you were golden, and if a three this year, you were gone. Made for a toxic, short-termist mindset. Not to mention, some looked for a shortcut or two to make the right numbers. Share value did increase, but I was very happy to leave eventually. RIP, Jack - I hope God didn’t rank you a 3.
38
@Gene sadly, many of his “strategies” are still in place at companies throughout this country. Every time someone quotes the Great Jack Welch, I get a little queasy.
8
My condolences to his family. Let's hope history does not forget his flagrant and reprehensible lies about President Obama that he never apologized for. He used his business credibility (which he had at the time) to slander a US President with unsupported allegations. Welch needs that to be part of his legacy
42
One wonders if he "took it with him".
One guesses not.
11
In the end, a scam artist who destroyed one of the world's great corporations. But, like many of his type, will probably leave an inheritance that will make his great grandchildren comfortable for all their lives.
27
Just another CEO celebrity. Famous for being famous.
17
Perhaps he will get some of his own medicine wherever he is headed.
12
Well he is the poster child for everything that is wrongheaded, toxic, and shortsighted in US corporate culture.
I, for one, do not mourn the passing of a man who cared more about dollar signs than people.
32
Business superstar?
I remember Jack being interviewed just before he left GE. He was asked if his business life ever interfered with his home life. That sure made him pause. He said that he could easily compartmentalize and both were doing just fine. Actually, no.
turns out his attorney wife had just been waiting for the marriage to pass the ten year mark so she would qualify for a better settlement from her long planned divorce.
Jack tried to hard ball the divorce so his wife released the details of his termination agreement with GE. Jack found out he was dealing with someone that was immune to his con.
This business "superstar" got his clock cleaned by his much smarter wife.
Just another example of the phony shine promoted by the business community.
53
Wow -- the only things people want to say about him -- is that he was bad.
18
Hmmm. No mention of the legacy of pollution left by Jack in the Hudson River and upstate communities. Polluter in Chief.
30
Reading all the comments here about Jack Welch's passing is a bit eerie. Reading these comments is like experiencing the scene in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" in which Scrooge, with the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, witnesses all those who welcomed his death.
I wonder if Jack Welch will become a Jacob Marley from some future CEO....
15
So the Catholic Church denied Mr Biden the Holy Eucharist because of his support for abortion rights and women's rights and also are denying an autistic boy to receive the Sacrament while allowing for a St Patrick's Cathedral funeral for a twice divorced, twice remarried Jack Welch (not to mention his infidelity while married).
Shame on you Archbishop Dolan! Hope you spend the money wisely!
64
Also provided Eucharist to Newt Gingrich, enemy of the poor, multiple marriages, etc.
20
Revenue is not profit. Welch was brilliant at fooling the business press but his management theories were disastrous. He sowed the seeds of GE's eventual collapse by stressing growth through takeovers and espousing the theory that GE should not be involved in "any industry in which GE was not first or second". He also supported firing the bottom ten percent of each group of managers each year. The first principle led to GE shedding profitable business and taking on losing ones. The second destroyed any sort of cooperative behavior on the part of managers.
69
@ianstuart
Having spend a decade as a middle manager during the Welch years, I disagree. Tough, you bet! Straight forward, you bet. Focused on growing management talent, you bet. The managers around me were a team-oriented cooperative bunch.
4
@Paul Tierney
But what were the middle managers oriented towards and cooperating on, cost cutting. At that they were successful. Cutting the cost of labor and cutting the cost of products with a resultant drop in quality.
That was good for the shareholders - for a while, but not so much for employees and customers.
10
The stock holders of GE could have done better if Jack Welch had not retired. Sometimes the value of a person is better appreciated after they no longer hold the position when they held. RIP Jack Welch. Hopefully, lessons will have been learned that could result in better stock price.
2
@Girish Kotwal:
Welch is largely responsible for the destruction of GE as a major US company.
54
@Girish Kotwal There was a recession right after he retired, and various agencies were beginning to clue in on various practices of GE. So, who knows?
Probably would not have done better if he stuck around through 2007, when the consequences of over-financialization became starkly apparent...
1
He sure was an idol when I went to business school in the late 90s. A few years later, it was shocking to see him struggling to understand or explain the financial crisis of 2008. In the end, all of those Darwinian-selected managers at GE couldn’t face the reality of a changing financial landscape.
35
Well, with the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and the subsequent Great Recession you had widespread white collar crime going on, almost systemic. Notably with misrepresenting the pools of debt underpinning many financial instruments getting traded. But also, very irresponsible levels of borrowing going on in the financial sector.
Maybe like Greenspan he couldn't believe that management could act so recklessly. Or just didn't want to believe so.
4
My husband was an engineer at GE Research in Niskayuna, NY, for 32 years, mostly during Welch’s tenure. In 2004 at the age of 57 he became part of the bottom 10%, despite receiving a management award for outstanding performance the previous year. Many in that bottom 10% just happened to be over 55. GE expected 110% of an employee’s effort. We were rewarded with stock options but I’m not sure that made up for the hours that his job took him away from his family.
We also saw the city of Schenectady decimated during our time there. The Main Plant, which employed over 40,000 people during WW2, became a brown field as the company razed buildings to avoid paying property taxes. And Schenectady wasn’t the only town to suffer this fate.
My husband is more forgiving of Jack Welch than I am. We are financially secure now thanks to dumping all our GE stock as soon as my husband left the company. I’ll shed no tears for Welch but will lift a glass tonight to celebrate the passing of a toxic manager.
197
@Donna Hatfield Many of us in the Capital District and beyond will. I hope the bars on Erie Blvd and State Street in Schenectady are packed tonight.
24
@Donna Hatfield
I'm glad you dumped the shares. Those options became worthless now that GE is on the edge of bankruptcy.
13
@Donna Hatfield In reading all of these Comments about the unfortunate legacy Mr. Welch continuously created for himself, my beloved and late grandmother's wisdom is supremely relevant today: "We all write our own obituary every day of our lives."
22
For those who think we are not a socialist country:
"G.E., like many large banks, tapped emergency government loans to help it get through the upheaval."
Glass-Steagall existed for a reason, banks and others who sought to trade in quick and easy money, maximizing profit at the expense of prudent business practices. Banks and others who originate loans should be tasked to keep at percentage of them and ensure they are made good. This is what would protect the economy from profit taking, easy credit terms that set the consumer and institution up to fail.
28
Welch’s business ethos still stands today. Corporate profits, shareholder value still matter most. Personal responsibility, the ability to get ahead, entrepreneurial spirit drove his persona. He was a champion to most in the business world, but maligned by the socialists today and when he was CEO. What a great life well lived.
4
@Robert
He destroyed more shareholder value than anyone else.
14
@Robert
"G.E., like many large banks, tapped emergency government loans to help it get through the upheaval."
Who's the real socialist ?
Corporate 0.1% Welfare Queens and their CEOs.
20
@Robert To be clear, Jack was the embodiment of not accepting personal or corporate responsibility. As a GE VP, he was responsible for the operations at Fort Edward and Hudson Falls that caused the PCB contamination of the Hudson all the way out to the Atlantic. AS GE CEO, he engaged in a strategy of denial and disinformation. While representing a Town whose water supply was destroyed by GE's disposal of PCBs to the River, I conducted a full deposition of Jack. I can tell you that he never accepted any responsibility either personally or on behalf of GE. And by the way, contrary to Jack's calculated and expensive PR campaign, the evidence was clear that the disposal was purposeful, unpermitted, substantial and illegal.
42
Jack Welch's praise as a CEO during the 80's is a perfect example of greed run amok.
GE's purchase of RCA, NBC's parent company, for example, was fueled partially by the money machine the broadcaster had become during that decade. At the time, RCA's name recognition with the general public was due to it's consumer electronics division. But there was so much more to it and GE knew that. There was the prestige of owning RCA's famed Sarnoff Research Center, one of the most prestigious R & D facilities in the world; and the company's highly accomplished aerospace and defense divisions.
Labeled a merger, GE immediately began dismantling RCA, selling it off in chunks and of course, shedding thousands of people in the process. The company became so large, it practically collapsed under its own weight and is now a shadow of its former self. And Welch and the board of directors are to blame.
42
I worked in business in the 80s and 90s when Welch was a hero to other corporate leaders who emulated his business practices. It was a prosperous time for companies, but the beginning of ugly times for employees, who became mere disposable commodities.
I vividly recall an all-hands meeting in the late 1980s when a very senior executive said to us, "And we all know why we come to work every day." In the pause that followed his statement, I thought about all of us needing to support ourselves and our families, and maybe also find some satisfaction in our work. But then he continued by saying, "To turn a profit for the shareholders."
Welch popularized an entirely shareholder profit-driven model of business which irreparably changed the employer-employee relationship. Now seen as costly "overhead," employees were laid off according to management's newest quarterly plans, with little or no concern for their well-being. Yet somehow they were expected to be "loyal" to a company that showed no loyalty to them.
Sound familiar? If you wonder where Trump formed his management style that continues into this presidency, you need look no further than the business practices he cut his teeth on in the 80s.
45
In the past, two scientists at GE Laboratories received Nobel prizes for doing basic science and GE researchers were given a lot of latitude in the choice of their projects. Jack Welch put an end to that. Long-term research is no longer funded by GE and scientists must pursue government grants if their projects cannot show short-term results. Jack Welch was the poster boy for our decadent economic system. Manipulate money, buy other people's successful ideas, slurp at the government trough, skim billions off the top and produce nothing of value.
53
@Nana2roaw In addition to those Nobel Prize winners, GE employed Nick Holonyak Jr. at the time he made the first LED (light emitting diode). LEDs are now ubiquitous, in everything from home electronics, to traffic lights, to signage on mass transit vehicles. The value of this one invention alone is incalculable.
12
In the late 90's my employer, Chase, decided to embrace Six Sigma. We had lots of meeting, lots of charts and lots of Powerpoint presentations quoting Jack. We watched as people earned the various "belts" as they ascended up the Six Sigma chain. Net result of all of this training- nothing but wasted time and energy, but it sure looked good on a resume. At the same time I was going through my training I spoke with my uncle, a senior engineer at GE (who retired from GE after 53 years not too long ago) who stated that most of the non-corporate people hated Jack and the damage that he was doing in order to please Wall Street. He had his moment and a few profited, but Jack started the decay that killed a once great American company.
60
I never admired this man. He made money for the company (and more so for himself) by taking advantage of right wing changes in tax law and the wholesale firing of employees. His company and others never really became stronger; money was taken from the structure to profit big shareholders and executive managers.
31
Highly overrated, not to mention over-compensated.
54
The most over rated CEO ever.
64
This country, and the world, will not survive the 21st century with the ethics of the 20th century, that Welch exemplified.
31
The "Manager of the Century" managed to ruin companies and careers. He didn't manage his marriages all that well either. GE's share value grew for a while because of the financial services part of the company; but it is not worth anywhere near as much now. This was the worst kind of American businessman: in it for the short term and selling with smoke and mirrors. I'll pass on the hagiography.
45
Fascinating reading, these comments. Not one favorable slant on the tenure of the guy described in the official obit. Welch's actions seem to demand as many apologies as slavery does -- another dark spot in history.
29
@fourteenwest
Correction. I read ONE positive comment, hundreds of very negative comments.
4
I had the distinct displeasure of working for two companies led by Welch disciples. Hundreds of productive, qualified, and competent people, hourly to executive, thrown into the trash to try to meet ridiculous growth and profitability targets that were rarely if ever achieved; which of course led to more cuts and "restructuring" to try to meet the next round of even more aggressive targets. It was like no one ever lasted long enough to retire.
Multiple acquisition target companies were told basically "this is going to be great for you" while all the while the Day 1 plans included 25% across the board job cuts and factory closings. It wasn't a business strategy; it was a flamethrower.
Make the quarter and buy a little time till the next one falls short when it all started again. How many of those great GE spawn actually did some jail time? I think more than one.
Welch and his corporate descendants will be remembered by many of my colleagues and me not as visionary leaders, but only as ruthless, unreasonable, and piratical blowhards.
60
I recall helping close down an RCA facility in Deptford, NJ. I was taken around back by an employee to be shown the "oldest tree in NJ." Behind it lay a vast rolling meadow which I was told was formerly the family picnic grounds for RCA employees. Family gatherings, softball games, company picnics and celebrations of the bond between employer and employee. After Neutron Jack only the ghosts inhabited that beautiful space. What a shameful memorial.
40
I'm not certain why we laud CEO's who take profit and big severances on the backs of employees. It must have something to do with the old Puritan ethic that believed if you were successful you deserved even more while those less successful deserved even less. Many of Jack's protege's went on the practically destroy other companies. Nardelli at Home Depot for instance. I don't think the 21st century will take kindly to many of the 20th century CEOs. Time will tell.
42
@Pat Because too many Americans are incredibly shallow and don't appear to have the capacity for empathy necessary to care about others.
5
Greedy employees with an outsized sense of entitlement damaged Home Depot, not Nardelli. His demand they no one on the retail eve be paid more than $8/hr was valid and appropriate. It’s a big box store, not a left wing jobs program. When those employees left, they ignored the needs of the customer, the very people who pays their wages.
1
I hate to say it, but I will:
People with ideas about how to treat workers and businesses the way Jack Welch did are dying off.
That can only be a good thing for this country.
There is too much praise here for a man that hurt tens of thousands of people.
54
@Joe Slight correction:
"There is too much praise here for a man that hurt BILLIONS of people."
... by altering the way businesses work so they couldn't care less about the people who work for them... and who now have such paltry wages that they can't even buy the very goods or services those companies provide.
11
Did anyone else notice that Jack Welch devoted his entire life to himself and only himself? There is nothing in any obituary that speaks to his philanthropy or charitable work.
I don't prescribe to the "don't speak ill of the dead" when the dead person was awful in life.
Jack Welch lived a life of greed and gluttony. Dying surrounded by riches was way too good for him.
66
Reading to the end makes it clear that this was a man with limited ethics and who shared the appetite for trophy wives that was all too common at the apex of American business of his generation. He switched from a focus on making things to making money, at the cost of as well of hundreds of thousands of American jobs in an approach that led to the inequality and divisiveness of American society today.
32
As comments in these spaces confirm, his death will be well received in many quarters, and widely celebrated in others.
20
I worked for GE after Jack Welch had transformed the company. Our warehouse was a study in Neutron Jack. It had two "employees." Plus three "temps" who were permanent in the real sense of the word but didn't count towards head count. No benefits, no health insurance. The best one had been there five years. When his kid needed serious health care the coworkers donated. But -- the temps worked circles around the "employees," who honestly didn't care.
23
Welch should have remained in what he knew best - chemical engineering. His lack of empathy for and understanding of people, disdain for law and policy, and huge ego fed by the board and media made him the anthesis of good leadership. Companies that sought to replicate his dump ‘em performance review process wound up — just as GE did — with law suits and poorly motivated work places. Anyone who thinks management and leadership can or should be reduced to bumpersticker slogans should select another career. And please don’t run for President.
23
Read Tom O'Boyle's "At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric and the Pursuit of Profit" to learn the full story of Welch's heartless management.
22
Farewell to the most over rated Fortune 500 manager of all time. Jack destroyed GE. Yes, he pumped up the stock price and he profited greatly from doing so. But he gutted one the pillars of American manufacturing to do so, eliminating hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs and tearing apart the R&D of what was one of the most innovative companies in history.
I am from Pittsfield, Mass, where Jack got his start. He and my father arrived at GE the same year and shared a bond as both graduated from the University of Illinois. At one time they were friends, but my Dad was not interested in running the company, he liked being an engineer. By the time Jack left Pittsfield he was widely despised and the appellation "Neutron Jack" had come into use. The joke went, "when Jack takes over a division soon all the people are gone, but the buildings are still standing." When Welch left Pittsfield, GE employed at least 42,000 people in a city of 80,000. Once Jack was running GE he began to gut Pittsfield. First he shut down the large transformer division. Then he began shrinking and selling off the other divisions. Today there is no GE in Pittsfield.
Jack did similar damage to cities all across upstate New York, which had once been the heart of General Electric, the place where Charles Steinmetz' genius made possible GE's prosperity. Welch bailed from GE before the consequences attempt to turn GE into a financial company took hold. GE is a shell of what it once was.
54
Disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that Welch's obituary should not once mention his most tangible legacy:
https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Dredging-up-the-truth-5294643.php
18
@William S. Thanks for mentioning this. I live near Pittsfield and this community is STILL dealing with the PCB nightmare that Jack Welch created.
10
He was the real Monty Burns.
16
Some people say he was the greatest thing since sliced bread, others say he is an example of what a CEO should not be.
Truth is he was probably somewheres in between.
RIP Mr Welch.
5
It sure appears that neutron Jack's severance was based on a percentage of money saved from the salaries and benefits of the people he laid off and fired. Capitalism run amuck with no accounting for the live and communties left behind by his hyper aggressive,law of the jungle business practices
25
The Times is too diplomatic in it's descriptions of the divorce. Read all the details in link below.
Anyone who does this to a once beloved spouse was a very unhappy man.
I seem to remember he announced his divorce to his wife in the newspaper but that may have been Rudy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1038347809827912908
11
Profit over people and over planet is what I understand from most comments I read today. Clearly an outdated attitude and not what is needed in the 21st century. It is a sad truth that the foundation of GE’s future was not well laid by „Neutron Jack“.
13
"Neutron" Jack, so called for ruthless firing of employees en masse should be remembered as representative of some of the worst aspects of capitalism this country has ever produced.
57
Jack was an interesting guy. He was adored by the managers of GE. He made some good business choices when he bought RCA and made Gary Wendt the head of GE Capital and Dennis Dammerman CFO. He made some bad choices when he bought Kidder and tried to buy Honeywell and promoted Mike Neal. GE became a Jack cult and he regarded himself very, very very highly. He was neither a business genius nor a villain. He never had a high regard for labor, but worried about bond ratings and return on capital. He was a man of the '80s who caught a substantial tail wind in the '90s that was thought to be acumen. RIP
8
He "made or beat the numbers" every quarter- that was his big appeal to the Wall Street "analysts" who praised and feted him. That was Job One for Welch. Whether he ever had a long term vision for GE is questionable to say the least. He got into financial engineering with GE Capital and played accounting games with the P&L using basically the unregulated bank which GE Capital became under his watch. For a while he made a lot of money for investors. He made a ton of money for himself. Does that make him the CEO of the Century? I don't think so. He was no Bill Gates or even Steve Jobs; not an innovator, more of a leverage debt king/ asset shuffler/numbers manipulator/salesman.
As others have noted, he was a very nasty character and seemed to relish shutting down businesses and firing loads of loyal GE employees without a second thought. It all fell apart after he retired but that was the house of cards he left. He spent his "Golden Years" on TV as a raging lunatic consumed with hatred and endless vitriol for Pres. Obama- was it racially motivated? who knows- seemed so to me -maybe Welch thought he should be president, not this black "nobody"- anyway, just goes to show how reputations can quickly change and how ,for some, all the money and accolades in the world can't make you a decent human being.
59
Jack Welch was well known for his merger and acquisition strategies that led to all sorts of destruction of smaller companies and their employees. He is the sad model for the bad behavior of large corporations that exist is holding companies today like general electric.
46
What Jack Welsh did was pit worker against worker for the benefit of management. This is a major cause of wage stagnation. He also made management pay and shareholder profit paramount. This lead to the financial engineering that caused the financial crash in 2008. Sound business practices and growth through science was replaced by MBAs who's only focus was short term numbers.
60
Can you imagine how many families suffered as a result of those ruthless firings? All this emphasis on the enrichment of shareholders will invite a scary comeuppance.
44
Jack Welch moved GE away from manufacturing and into financial services.
How is GE doing today? How many people do they employed with good jobs.
It was not "the swamp" in Washington that caused the deindustrialization of America. It was people like Jack Welch.
Now, Trump has his followers believing that somehow President Obama was involved.
Welch had a PhD in chemical engineering. You'd think he would have had more empathy for people who work with their hands and make things. From afar, he appeared as a bully, and a golfer who took a lot of mulligans while no one noticed.
82
“Neutron Jack” was a pioneer among CEOs who knew it was much easier — and more lucrative personally — to cut people and salaries rather than grow their businesses. We can thank him for his role in helping to destroy the middle class through shrinking wage increases and jobs, starting with the Reagan era and continuing right up to today. It’s perhaps fitting that at the same time he passes on, GE — a once-mighty company — may be on its last legs.
55
His policy was to fire the bottom percentage of employees always to keep everyone on their toes. Not a good role model.
33
From everything I’ve read about Jack Welch, he presided over a business culture where being a conscientious, hardworking and dedicated employee was never enough- you needed to have a killer instinct with team spirit always taking a back seat to ultra competitiveness in order to get ahead i.e. not be winnowed out at the end of each year. I did not admire him or his “one-sentence nuggets” of corporate wisdom.
46
This is an unbearably long, expository obituary for someone who it appears did more harm than good in his tenure at GE. I can think of many people more deserving of column-lines than Jack Welch.
I’m sure his family will miss him, but I doubt the workers and families whose lives he ruined will do the same.
Let’s hope he’s one of the last, if not the last, of his kind; the world needs business leaders more focused on people than profit.
80
Normally, one doesn't like to speak ill of the dead, much less so on the day their death is announced. Jack Welsh is one of the few for whom there must be an exception to this rule, not least because the army of sycophants (especially at MSNBC), will continue to spread darkness about this delinquent's alleged greatness.
When historians look back and chart America's decline, Jack Welsh's real record of false and misleading 'financial' accomplishments will be a milestone. It will include his destruction of a major American company (including the eradicating of a major computing division which a later iteration of the company has tried to rebuild whilst pretending that they were moving into the future rather than correcting one of Welch's many blunders), and his perpetrating one fraud after another inside his greater "GE" and thereafter. The last Welch fraud favorite was, by my count, his promotion of for-profit colleges like University of Phoenix.
In the Machiavelli that dolts like Welch never read, the Florentine observed that in corrupt times, bad men make it to the top. The success of moral cripples like Welch marks the triumph of greed and stupidity. Thanks to Forbes and all the other sycophant financial press clowns from the 80s until today, Welch's wreckage will be with us for generations. The pathway from Welch via Reagan and directly to Donald Trump is fairly directed and embodied in hacks like Larry Kudlow and Jim Cramer.
102
To me, he'll always be the guy that killed my hometown. In a stealth move, he arranged to close offices and factories that accounted for the employment of tens of thousands of workers, and a lot of these were white collar jobs. The city has never recovered. This was revenge for strikes, which were frequent at the time. He was a vindictive bully, not a negotiator. You'll find no mourning for Jack from me.
101
The iconic proponent of the darker forces of capitalism.
36
Make no mistake, Jack set the stage for the Jeff Immelt era and the more recent company financial and strategic disasters. That part of what he created needs to be added to the obit.
27
Jack Welch is lionized? Superstar?
He epitomized nastiness, monetizing the dehumanization of workers. His idea of simply dismissing the "lowest" performers, ruining lives for the sake of his own self-interest, was a catalyst for the period of unbridled greed we continue to suffer from.
I don't celebrate anyone's death, but he was more "mangler of the century" than "manager of the century."
58
Jack's tenure is proof that pushing for short-term profits have long-term consequences. His legacy as corporate executive is a worthless management method and an unapologetic destruction of our environment.
29
St. Peter is having a long talk with Jack at the Pearly Gates right now. It’s not going well, something about “Do unto others...
48
"Bully of the Century" is more like it. Big deal. He had the entire company scared to death of him and it eventually caught up with GE.
36
When I worked for Boeing it was said that the CEO at the time, Jim McNerney, followed the Jack Welch school of management. Layoffs and saving money were the primary focus. Muilenburg and the current set of problems followed.
33
Sorry- Neutron Jack destroyed my hometown, putting Profits Over People. Shareholders won- for a while- but GE communities faced boarded storefronts, underfunded schools and opioids.
37
Two words - Kidder Peabody. Jack made accounting exciting again, forensic accounting an absolute blast.
7
Destroyed a company. Destroyed many lives. He deserves no acclaim on his way out. By the way, he can take "Six Sigma" with him.
48
@Cold Liberal - I couldn't fight my way through the article to see if his embrace of the Six Sigma House of Cards was mentioned. The Black Belt projects he so loved and crammed down people's throats were just another way to fudge the numbers. Six Sigma is nothing more than re-heated and re-packaged Common Sense Quality from the true masters Juran and Deming.
5
In 2003, GE started their marketing campaign "Imagination At Work". At the time, GE was happy to imagine paying for Neutron Jack's $83,000/month apartment in Manhattan as part of his "Golden Parachute". But, unfortunately for me and GE, in January 2003, their imagination was incapable of saving my Power Systems engineering job; a job with cutting-edge experience that GE would later need (and they knew it).
I am not angry at Jack or at GE, but God giving Jack the ultimate final pink slip is, in a way, a good thing. He's from the 1980s and the 1980s "greed is good" mentality needs to die off ASAP because, the demise of an America in which both companies and employees truly felt "United We Stand" began to die with Neutron Jack's rise and Reagan's election.
May God have mercy on his soul - a mercy he did not show to those that were loyal to him and "The Meatball".
38
@VJR
Welch met the devil in the 1980's and the devil turned him into Neutron Jack, more ruthless and less a manager. His "generous severance packages" did little to mollify the lives of the age 55+ "retirees" dumped into a hostile work world. Carefully read the comments of many of them given herein.
2
GE more or less got its start in Pittsfield, Mass. after swallowing up Stanley Electric. At one time 12,000 people were employed at the GE plants in Pittsfield. They are, of course, all gone. When GE left Pittsfield, it also left the Housatonic River horribly polluted with PCB's and spent many millions of dollars in legal fees trying to avoid the responsibility of cleaning up the River. For many years, Mr. Welch has been "personna non grata" in Berkshire County. Good riddance.
50
@Don The plant in Lynn MA is pretty much empty.
3
@Don Sorry to say no mention in the article of all the pollution this guy and GE dumped on the Hudson River Valley. This guy and GE totally not worth it.
6
His legacy will be of "making the numbers" at all cost. https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/04/ge-immelt-sec-earnings-business-beltway-ge.html#6a1112a75047
10
Neutron or whatever Jack never had any vision for GE beyond himself. Beyond being grandiose and butchering the common GE workers he had no knowledge of the American economy. His contribution to save American economy during President Obama was a big zero. His racist attitude was quite apparent the way he denigrated Obama.
45
the comments tell a truer story than the article ---
this guy declared that he bought and sold companies to manage the stock price / dividend --- which would have meant it was manipulation and illegal -- but in the age of greed he embodied, nobody ever called him on it .... 50-100-150+ M&A each year to fit into quarterly and yearly numbers targeted with hundreds of lawyers and accountants doing nothing productive except cooking the books .....
an entire reputation built on such practices, but applauded by the shareholder first mentality -- and he was "too big to fail" --- nobody dared say NO .....
does this sound like anyone in a big white house right now ?? just lie about anything you want to and declare yourself and your version of events the facts .....
GE was a "big corporation" so no wonder they had no social backbone, that was then .... they were all that way --- so take the lesson, world .... then vs. now for GE
They bought RCA -- and I watched from the inside of NBC as they sold off pieces for more than the sale price within 18 months and were left with all of NBC (and more) for free ...... did that have anything to do with the stock they gave to the RCA board when the deal closed ???
a clawback of all the riches he self granted should happen ..... and a full apology to every past GE worker who suffered from his garbage ideas .....
it stunk to high heaven back then --- because it WAS garbage ...
36
What is GE stock worth today? That number tells you all you need to know about Mr. Welch's corporate legacy. That said, may he rest in peace.
18
I met Mr Welch in the late 80-s when I worked in the NYC offices. I should correct that to Jack -- he never stood on ceremony with us lesser mortals. Favourite Jack quote: if you can't do your job in 8 hours a day, you are doing something wrong. Best (and earliest) advice for work-life balance ever.
6
Having worked for GE for decades, I saw the rise and fall of GE. He was a man who mostly benefited from fortuitous timing. At the time of Welch's tenure, the company had a lot of fat and he squeezed out every $ - which was probably a good thing. However he took it too far - to the point of squeezing blood out of a stone, and the company cracked. No long-term vision, just squeezing and taking advantage of short-term, opportunistic financial and market trends. He treated people like disposable cogs, and mostly abandoned a technology mind set (after all the company was founded by tech folks) and turned the crank on financial wheeling and dealing which brought very little long-term value to the company. He left the company a cracked, hollowed out shell, with many good people leaving, and the remaining staff having little purposeful vision (except to make money). It was not surprising that GE went down, and that he successors had little to work with.
78
Welch's policies of taking on massive debt and liabilities effectively destroyed GE as a major firm. That it happened after he left is immaterial, his successor pursued the same destructive policies.
Increased revenue is next to meaningless if it means massive increases in liabilities.
I see the part Welch played in the theft of the 2000 US presidential election is omitted.
His part in pressuring NBC News in New York to call Florida for Bush on election night and therefore give the "win" to W, put Gore in the narrative position of being a challenger. When in fact Gore was simply one of two parties in an unsettled election.
52
I agree with you 100% and also the guy was very critical of Obama all the time.
14
He built a big house of cards at GE. Recently went through Schenectady NY, home of the GE electric power division. It looks like Detroit.
At least GE is not Westinghouse, which for all practical purposes, is gone.
31
@RM When is the last time you visited Schenectady? It looks vastly better than it did when I worked at GE Power Systems from 1995-2003.
"The right person for the time."
I'm sure all those people laid off have a different phrase for Jack Welch. More colorful and not allowed in a family newspaper.
It's not hard to make the argument that he was everything that was wrong with US capitalism in the 80s. The intense focus on finance is proving to be a huge problem not just for GE but the economy as a whole. The Germans, instead, focused on actually manufacturing things that GE used to do, but does no longer.
And when you can only stay afloat because of the largesse of the taxpayer, it says some very unkind things about your business acumen. History will not look kindly on Jack Welch.
94
I had a B school professor who was a consultant to Welch and I asked him what he was like. He told me this story. Welch had hired a freshly minted MBA to work for him and he was supposed to meet Welch at a hotel in St. Louis for a breakfast meeting-his first day on the job. The MBA had transportation problems and showed up 5 minutes late. Welch looked at his watch and told the MBA he was fired. The professor swore that it was true.
31
I am very surprised at so few comments in response to Jack's death. The fact that so few people commented on Jack's death is perhaps indicative of this age-old adage:
"If you can't say anything nice about someone, say nothing at all."
22
@VJR:
The full obit has only been up for 52 minutes.
And as you know, the crash of 2008 destroyed his reputation as a smart manager--also managed to destroy the "fundamentals" of Reaganomics and Milton Friedman's "economics".
27
@Yaj
The obit has been up for a few hours. Given Jack was "CEO of the Century", you'd have thought more people would have chimed in.... Maybe there'll be a flood of them tonight, but there are a lot of people (possibly including his 2 ex-wives) who are biting their tongue as they silently embrace this news.
Personally, I don't relish Jack's death, but he was a mid-wife to the disaster our country has become.
Once again, William Shakespeare's Marc Antony in "Julius Caesar" offers the best assessment:
"The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;"
Now that he is gone, we still have to live in the dysfunctional world he bequeathed us.
13
Not sure about his brilliance.
Most of the profit was off of GE capital, which turned out to be smoke and mirrors.
Raked in short term profit that left GE in bad shape long term.
Found his book at the airport and tried to read it, but could not get very far.
Most of it was praising himself, with very little useful content.
Manager of the Century- ok sure.
33
can we get a count of how many smaller companies fell into bankruptcy because GE was big enough to refuse to pay its bills and then could get away with paying the 10-15% the contractor was desperate enough to accept before folding and laying off everybody? been there.
32
I disagree strongly with NYT columnist James B. Stewart and continue to admire Jack Welch's tough, disciplined management with its focus on profitability for GE's owners - its stock owners.
We all have benefited from GE's product successes of his era.
5
@ProfStewart:
those "profits" came about because Welch took on massive liabilities for decades.
17
Revenue doubled 5 fold because Jack went on an acquisition spree that loaded the balance sheet with Billions in debt. He ruined GE. The stock trades at $10 because investors doubt GE will ever pay back the billions borrows by "the investor of the century"
68
Would have expected some more detailed comment on how GE managed earnings and delved into financial engineering during these years, above and beyond a reference or two to how the company was left vulnerable to the financial crisis and great recession by 2007-2008.
More ink should have been expended on that versus the anecdotes on his formative years and parents.
24
Unfortunately, this obituary fails to mention the numerous times Jack Welsh took to CNBC and the print media to castigate the collection and reporting of the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment numbers during the period of the Great Recession and significant improvement in employment engineered by President Obama during his presidency. More than once, he implied that those statistics were fabricated and manipulated, implying that a nationwide cadre of collectors, numbering in the thousands, could conspire to fabricate these numbers relied upon by businesses, banks, stock traders, investment advisory firms, academics, and a host of others. He seemed to detest the idea that Barack Obama was President and felt it his calling to denigrate him in any way he could instead of using his leadership to promote the vigorous recovery that Obama and his advisors were putting in place. His routine and unapologetic claims of statistical manipulation by the BLS and the collectors made me question whether his judgments regarding the health or distress of economy and unemployment were integrable and rather an outpouring of visceral, partisan dislike of Barack Obama.
169
@Swimcduck I agree with you 100%. He used to detest Obama.
13
@Kamlesh Where Obama was involved, Welsh ignored his mother's lesson that you had to learn the right way to lose if you wanted to be a winner. He threw his hockey stick at Obama every single time I heard him in an interview or read his remarks. And, as to his claims about the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, he never presented evidence of any kind to support his allegations of fraud or manipulation. And on CNBC, Joe Kernan just encouraged it because it fed his political biases.
11
@Swimcduck
From Yale Insights by Sonnenfeld: "Worth noting: one of his interventions into NBC’s business operations was to push for what became The Apprentice. President Trump told me 15 years ago that Welch was envious of CBS’s successful and highly profitable reality TV show Survivor —and demanded that Jeff Zucker grab that show’s producer, Mark Burnett and migrate that same elimination game format to a business setting—with Trump on the throne."
Italy had mass media and political manipulator, Berlusconi
The US had Jack Welch, (C)NBC, and Trump. All one big bad of dirt.
11
And where is GE now? Crowned brilliant and innovative, his disregard for employees created the 21st Century serfdom. A $417 million severance package in 2001 for Jack Welsh while he cut workers earnings is why we are faced with a crippled middle class.
138
Jack Welch piloted the GE ship-of-state smack into the early 2000's financial bubble. It was his decision to turn the company's focus to the "financial engineering" of GE Capital. Jack Welch was in the first wave of businessmen we now term "disrupters". His short term plan for raising shareholder value was spectacularly successful; his long term plan, not so much. Jack either ran out of time or ran out of plan. In any case, GE shareholders were left out-to-dry, but Jack retired with about $700 million of shareholder money.
That sounds fair to me.
41
Not necessarily in vogue today but thought he was a great CEO for the time. Certainly delivered results and opened peoples' minds to other ways of thinking about business. RIP Jack
4
@G Bryce:
depends how you define results.
His policies destroyed GE in the long run.
20
Of all my memories of Jack Welch, here's the one that sticks with me most: his readiness to accuse the Bureau of Labor Statistics of falsifying its job reports in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential election in order to defend Obama.
Welch had zero evidence to support that libel of both the federal government's civil servants and the Obama administration's political appointees. But he didn't hesitate to lob the accusation anyhow.
I should have already understood what kind of guy he was by then, but that nailed it for me. It was a clear signpost on the road to Trump.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-jackwelch/jack-welch-sets-twitter-ablaze-with-obama-job-jab-idUSBRE8941CR20121005
91
Spouse couldn't leave GE in Pittsfield, MA soon enough. He put 20 years in for GE Defense, and said he had to leave to undo all the bad karma of working on the fire control systems for nuclear submarines, among other things.
His uncle worked for the GE in some hellish job where he cleaned up the insides of transformers, PCBs up to his knees. He died very young of a brain tumor.
Now in Berkshire County, we're still cleaning up PCBs. Thanks Jack.
76
@Susan Aaah yes, silver lake and the dams on the Housatonic river to stop the PCBs from flowing downstream. I remember those days when I lived there. Such a nice area with such an industrial waste problem created by GE
19
@Susan
Please don't leave out the Hudson river.
9
G.E. spent decades as a shiny hallmark brand at the center of American culture. How does its current state not bear the fingerprints of Mr. Welch?
27
"... Mr. Welch distilled his management concepts into one-sentence nuggets. “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” “Be candid with everyone.” “Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed.” “If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.” ….. "
He forget one nugget:
“Don't eat your seed corn.”
34
I doubt that the people who worked for Welch have a good word to say for him.They called him neutron Jack, because he fired thousands, but left the buildings intact. He cut the payroll substantially, and he also closed GE's legendary research laboratory, which developed many important inventions and processes, starting with the electric light bulb, going on to artificial diamonds, jet engines, CAT scanners, MRI devices, etc. His sole purpose making these cuts and slashes was to raise the short-term earnings and therefore the stock price for the shareholders.
His predecessor, Reginald Jones, was a business, statesman, who advised the government on the economy and labor relations. He made one big mistake, however, He appointed Jack Welch to succeed him.
121
@Diogenes
And I suspect Mr. Jones, as well as the majority of top level CEO's prior to Welch, watched longer-term results more closely than short-term.
I saw it happen in 1982. Welch began to be cited everywhere and short-term profit and stock-price results became the key indicator. Deep decline in real business results followed - to this day.
29
@Diogenes and depart GE with 417 Millions in his pocket as a severance pay.
2
@Diogenes Yes. My father worked for GE from 1958 to 1997 and his greatest experience was the six years he spent at the Niskayuna, NY research lab. Having earned his Ph.D. in physics, he was on his way. But by 1982, he just hung on despite the 20 plus patents he brought to GE.
He despised Welch.
24
From The Week Magazine for March 18, 2011:
When did offshoring become so prevalent?
The trend began in earnest in the late 1970s at large manufacturers such as General Electric. GE’s then CEO, Jack Welch, who was widely respected by other corporate chieftains, argued that public corporations owe their primary allegiance to stockholders, not employees. Therefore, Welch said, companies should seek to lower costs and maximize profits by moving operations wherever is cheapest. “Ideally,” Welch said, “you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” Not only did GE offshore much of its manufacturing, so did its parts suppliers, which were instructed at GE-orchestrated “supplier migration seminars” to “migrate or be out of business.”
May he be remembered for this.
79
He was the avatar of corporate greed and the kind of toxic masculinity that's responsible for so much of the destruction of the planet that we face now.
137
A man who left a trail of destruction and harm with his "business is everything" mentality.
45
How do we rate the offering of free, PCB laden, land fill to the residents of Berkshire county, MA?
33
@Andrew Hoar That would explain a few things about Pittsfield.
1
My friends and neighbors from Hudson Falls and Fort Edward NY not killed by GE's PCB's don't think kindy of this man.
48
An exemplar of the traits and philosophy of the "right" side American business, he was, that Mr. Welch. The company so closely associated with, oh a ruined shell largely as a result of his 'vision" . Neutron jack indeed. The money weeps
13
How ironic that during a part of Welsh's years their ad was "GE we bring good things to life" all while he was doing just the opposite as "neutron Jack".
30
Part of Welch's legacy contains a few ugly warts. He repeatedly said ugly and untrue things about Barack Obama and played a big part in stoking the racist resentment of the President.
73
@del indeed. In October 2012 he tweeted that Obama manipulated the employment numbers to make himself look good for the upcoming election.
2
Poster boy for American greed.
99
This is the guy who manipulated the accounting at GE, right? The forerunner to today's problems. Have never seen the media properly take him to task for this.
50
Neutron Jack ... who authorized firing 10% of his employees annually. Darwinian manager of the century.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/neutron-jack-welch-ceo-general-electric-ge.asp
36
Let's be serious. The GE of today is the direct destination of the path set by Neutron Jack.
40
A good, deep obit.
He was the consummate 80's Wall street hero: the "products" became irrelevant, profit and investor gains everything, and there was no long term view - not when it came to the company itself, which became valued only for its parts, which if underperforming were sold, not fixed.
Perhaps he did foresee the inevitable globalization of manufacturing which would leave the US unable to compete - - -
or perhaps he took the path of least resistance --
he started with enormous resources - and got out before the disastrous implications of not investing in the US were publicized.
22
Rest in peace Mr. Welch.
Hopefully your forced ranking system has also been completely laid to rest.
23
@Martin Hoping St. Peter does some stack-ranking of his own.
12
The declining fortunes of GE offer a few cautionary tales:
* The cult of personality is bad.
* Investors should understand what they're buying: It would be dishonest to say now that GE was a mirage, but the accounting was 'creative' and one-sided (buying a small startup and applying its high p/e ratio to the whole conglomerate...)
* If only the CEO can hold it together (see Carlos Ghosn) then it's not a real business model
* There's a size/diversification limit to what managers can competently oversee. Locomotive + NBC + Finance + Jet engines + Light bulbs + Medical equipment... = a mess
19
And once mighty GE remains on life support.
27
Reading these comments reminds me of Shakespeare. "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caeser."
24
Jack Welch made the case for the foolishness of shareholder worship. He might as well have screamed: "Hey Socialists! Come and get us."
Perhaps a new generation will embrace an "enlightened" version of capitalism that includes customers, suppliers and employees as important stakeholders.
His training ground for executives did produce some successful execs. It also gave us the likes of a Bob Nardelli who ripped the cultural guts out of Home Depot and went on to oversee the demise of Chrysler - collecting huge severance packages along the way.
Jack was a legend in his own mind. He and Bob were ideological hypocrites who were happy to accept government bailouts from those "evil regulators".
32
His legacy in my mind will forever be encapsaled by the time when he started a conspiracy during that the Obama labor dept was fudging labor stats.
And I've known a number of GE execs over the years who all said GE was powered by one guy- Gary Wendt who led GE Capital which was the engine hehind the stock. W/o Wendt (who dispised Welch) Welch would have just been another overpaid CEO.
18
This news has been met with many a dry eye.
"a more Darwinian, corporate culture" i.e chronically short-staffed. He created an environment where managers sought favor from higher-ups (including Jack) by cutting jobs. At a certain point, you need enough staff to keep the lights on, but Jack retired, having brought GE almost to its knees. A job thoroughly done.
21
Welch was a ruthless and (at best) amoral man. During a short window in time he made G.E. very profitable for investors and executives (who played his kind of hardball). During this time G.E. was a major polluter and opponent of environmental regulations. And how will history judge the man and his corporation? As Shelley put it in "Ozymandias"
"Look on my works ye mighty and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Historians make the final judgement, and history will not be kind to Jack Welch, his methods and his vision, and the "colossal wreck" he made of G.E.
32
As a new employee in 1996, I had 10 days of vacation (after 6 months), but was forced to use 5 of them over the Xmas plant closing. And then there was the cheese-laden “Six Sigma: Quality in Everything We Do” sham, where if you didn’t do a “project,” you would never receive a raise. Of course half of the Six Sigma “savings!” were contrived so big shots could make their number and brag about it. And finally, when our jobs were transferred to India, we were required to train our replacements or we wouldn’t receive our pittance of a severance. “Quality in everything we do” didn’t apply to employee relations.
110
And while overseeing the plastic plant in Pittsfield, Ma., he also oversaw the horrific polluting of the Housatonic River. On his watch. "The Housatonic River and its floodplain are heavily contaminated with PCBs originating from the GE Facility in Pittsfield, MA." Jack Welch was in charge.
24
Many of today’s problems can be tied to “The Legendary Jack Welch”. Cut costs to the bone, make stuff that does not last, load up on debt and be greatly overpaid. Welch was Exhibit A of everything wrong with corporate America. Boeing was run into the ground with Jack Welch protégées. As Warren Buffett so wisley said “You don’t know who is swimming naked until the tide goes out”.
42
Recall his retirement package. In addition to many millions of dollars, on top of all the cash he got over the years in salary and bonuses, among still more perks was a clause to have his laundry done. G.E. people mourning his passing may take solace that they don't have to pay for his laundry anymore.
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GE used to make stuff. Jack accelerated the decline of American manufacturing replacing it with financial engineering. The same thing has happened with Boeing--America's biggest exporter and (formerly) a model for the world. Boeing's move to Chicago announced the change in Boeing from a manufacturing/engineering shop to financial services company, like GE. And look what happened! Boeing still makes stuff but the quality and design is suspect, and not only the 737 MAX.
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GE under Welch grew through acquisitions. Every time a company makes an acquisition, there's an opportunity for revaluing the assets - and for accounting hanky-panky. Welch took full advantage of that. If you take a hard look at the numbers and re-run the figures, he was a failure as a CEO. He did a good job for the shareholders - so long as they found a greater fool to buy their shares and sold in time.
The article should also have mentioned GE's acquisition and management of Kidder Peabody, which was a disaster.
Welch's private life was a mess. Ditto Gary Wendt. The corporate culture under Welch probably wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of the MeToo era.
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You left out one of me Welch’s favorite sayings. “Don’t pay taxes”. The overall G.E. tax rate from 2008-2015 was negative. Makes you wonder what his personal rate was after his 400 million dollar bonus. If some “socialist” says companies and CEOs will pay at least the same rate on billions and millions of income that the rest of us do on a lot less income maybe it’s time to reconsider the evils of socialism. The idea that finance, that produces nothing except high incomes for those at the top (which they get to keep even when they tank the economy like in 2008) and the people that work for companies are simply cost centers to be eliminated is how to build a functional society is part of the reason the middle class has been destroyed over the last 40 years.
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Robert Reich, the former labor secretary in the Clinton administration , said that the Jack Welch ethos led to the “shredding of the old, tacit contract between corporations and their workers,” in which employees shared in the company’s prosperity in good times and were laid off only in bad times.
Jack Welch, a Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump champion supporter of endless tax cuts for corporations to cure society, was hardly someone to look up to.
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@Socrates
In 1952 the corporate tax share of the federal budget was ~35%. By 2013 it had fallen to ~10%. Its lower now. If this resulted in more hiring and investment it might serve some purpose. But it hasn’t. The jobs still go overseas and the benefits get cut while the CEO pay has skyrocketed. Given the wealth/income gap in this country, this way of thinking wouldn’t seem to have helped further the “american dream”.
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Reagan worked and was trained by GE for 11 years and also became part of the corporate voice for GE. When he became President, he responded as he was trained to be: anti-labor, anti-regulation, demonizing government control, and blaming the media for opposition response. Welch played the puppet created by GE to his advantage. Welch was one of the first members in the Koch brothers camp. Reagan was head of the union of screen actors at one time. Reagan loved the space effort but became the first President to curtail US roles in space, the first to limit US government research in aerodynamics, plasma physics, and the environment. Welch helped create Reagan, a nice guy, who fundamentally taught a nation to hurt itself. Incidentally, Welch's approach was just the authoritarian playbook from the Koch brothers (and their father).
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In 2003, GE started their marketing campaign "Imagination At Work". They happily imagined paying Jack's $83,000 / month apartment in Manhattan as part of his "Golden Parachute", but couldn't imagine keeping my $53,000 / year engineering job.
I am not angry at Jack or GE, but his passing is a reminder of the 1980s "Greed Is Good" mentality that needs to die off forever. Before Jack Welch and Ronald Reagan, both companies and employees truly felt "United We Stand" mentality in working for each other for our mutual benefit and the benefit of the country. But, with Jack's rise and Reagan's inauguration and subsequent Patco dismissal, all in 1981, "Greed Is Good" became the mentality and now we have over a generation of people in leadership positions who don't know what "United We Stand" really means beyond flag waving. The current income inequality and dysfunctional state of our society began with them.
May God have mercy on Jack's soul - a mercy he rarely showed to those that were loyal to him and "The Meatball".
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I'll always remember the Today Show interview with him during one of the first segments on September 11, 2001. Probably he always did, too. May he rest in peace.
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@Lynne Shapiro I remember him stuttering nervously before the cameras, just before he made a beeline out of New York state. I also remember that on that day, Daniel Day Lewis refused to leave New York and volunteered to move fresh water to hospitals. Rest in peace? I'll pass.
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@John Smith I am not into being angry at Mr. Welch for anything. There are more important political leaders and writers about them to be angry with today.
I say "May he/she rest in peace" for anyone who has died, as my religious parents taught me to do.
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In October of 2012, he accused Obama via Twitter, and if memory serves me correctly also on CNBC, of manipulating the jobs/employment numbers as a way to improve his re-election chances.
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When compared to its industrial counterparts in Germany and Japan -- say, Siemens and Toshiba -- it's hard to say that GE is such a great company. Like Westinghouse, it chose to go for the short term profit in the finance business rather than pioneering new products that would keep it focused on its core businesses. Like Westinghouse, GE is very likely to be a takeover target by the likes of Siemens or Toshiba in the coming years. Thanks, Jack.
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Shame on him for pushing his forced ranking program, a head cutting exercise run under the guise of an internal employee productivity system. This forced ranking plague spread to other companies and the resulting Hunger Games atmosphere pitting employees against one another within a company is something less than enlightened. "Team Building" anyone?
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To me, the importance of Jack Welch was his process to lay off the bottom-performing 10% of workers every year (having been a victim of that in corporate culture, myself). As an aside, I spoke with someone who rose through the ranks at GE and apparently they got rid of that system as it ultimately bred mediocrity.
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His management methods were followed by many other companies, and did enormous harm to those companies.
The fact that he was lionized by the media should be a cautionary tale, to be sure that we are not taken in again by simplistic solutions that end up doing more harm than good.
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I went to Wharton Grad school when Jack Welch was still running GE. I never understood all the hero worship that he had there and elsewhere. Seemed more driven by how much money he had and how big GE was than by his actual performance.
It's tough to think that he was a great leader when each of his divorces was preceded by finding another girlfriend first.
Also, it's easier to layoff the bottom 10% than to confront how that person got hired in the first place and wonder where that person, who may have worked quite honorably and honestly, should really be working in the corporation.
With the spinoff of GE Capital, all of the financial machinations that made GE look good are gone and now the true picture has emerged. Not nearly as pretty now.
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Some of these comments would serve as an appropriate epitaph for a man who put profit above all else, and had only two values: money and power. Oh, and self-aggrandizement. In pursuit of these he destroyed lives, cities, companies (his own, essentially in the end). He worshipped Mammon and Monopoly, and aided in gutting American Industry. Worse, he convinced many in corporate leadership positions to follow in his path. To know him, I would suggest reading "The Puritan Gift" to see how "management by the numbers" destroyed America's global business leadership and singular greatness. Jack's particular “genius” was to stress profit over value and investors over customers. (See "The Pims Principles" for the Bible on the subject.)
The mantra of Welch, still taught to MBA students today, is to “maximize return to your stockholders”, neglecting to mention that the best way to ensure this is to maximize value to your customers.
Jack’s path has been the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, with Jack as the Pied Piper (sorry for the mixed metaphor). Sorry for a life gone, and for his family, but not for him.
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This guy. Don't believe the hype – his hype. His approach (and personality) is one of the reasons Americans are struggling so much. The fact he is and will be largely judged on stock price while at GE is all too telling of the ills of our society.
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Sadly, Jack Welch's toxic management style, financial accounting manipulation, and excessive executive reimbursement have become de rigueur for U.S. healthcare companies. Comparison of healthcare to producing jet engines and using Six Sigma may be lethal in the face of Covid-19.
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@Kathryn
It’s interesting that the highest paid people in healthcare are not the people that take care of you. The same corporate ethos of, extract as much money from the customer ( patients) and give as little service or value to them in return ( cut Rn’s and doctors pay) while denying services is what has given us the most expensive mediocre healthcare on earth. But also the richest healthcare CEOs. It’s the typical US corporate way of thinking. They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
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The man was and is vastly overrated. He turned GE into an all-but-financial institution which set the stage for its own demise. His Six Sigma methodology was eyewash for his promoters. He failed to envision a future that GE could have dominated. He also fought the massive PCB cleanup of the Hudson River. GE used the Hudson like its own corporate sewer. No, Jack Welch was not an industrial giant.
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@Shillingfarmer yes, I remember his explanation for why he didn’t think they should clean up the carcinogens they had dumped into the Hudson was basically, “Why should we? We’re in business to make money, and there’s no money in that for us.”
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Jack Welch oversaw the transformation of General Electric from a world leading manufacturing company into a de facto financial firm. Since Welsh’s retirement in 2001, GE stock has gone from circa $50/share to a current $11/share. Some of Boeing's ‘management team’, are protégés of Welsh. Indeed, since 2013, Boeing has laid off over 1000 Engineers and spent over $43 billion on share buybacks. Unfortunately, Boeing is no longer able to produce a commercial airliner that can stay airborne. Jack left quite a legacy.
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I will argue that he has done more damage to business in America then any other CEO in modern time. He unleashed a group of managers who went on to be poor CEO's of many companies. The Boeing company problems are a direct result of one of his protege's. He was suppose to be a great developer of talent, but the record does not reflect that. Wall Street and the business press has largely given him a pass and let the myth of the great CEO stand.
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I will argue that he has done more damage to business in America then any other CEO in modern time. He unleashed a group of managers who went on to be poor CEO's of many companies. The Boeing company problems are a direct result of one of his protege's. He was suppose to be a great developer of talent, but the record does not reflect that. Wall Street and the business press has largely given him a pass and let the myth of the great CEO stand.
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Truly one of the most overrated, over publicized business executives of the last 50 years or more. The seeds of his take no prisoners, my way or the highway leadership poisoned not only the corporate culture of GE but tainted the governance practices and exec suites of a huge slice of the Fortune 500, who followed in his footsteps like lapdogs. Fifty years from now, Jack Welch will be the poster boy for the lion's share of everything that went wrong with big business since the 1960s. How ironic but entirely predictable that the national business press, which all but invented him from whole cloth, not to mention President Trump, are among those lionizing him today.
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One of the early self-promoters. His success at controlling the GE board and extracting huge compensation was a gift to CEO's everywhere. Where is GE today?
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Great loss to American engineering and ingenuity.
What I remember most from Jack's book was what a details-oriented, hands on manager he was, and how he forced his lower level managers to conduct comprehensive yearly evaluations of every employees performance. Upon completion of annual performance reviews, he required each manager to fire the lowest performing 10% of their workforce, and to replenish staff as necessary. Talk about survival of the fittest.
Harsh? Maybe. But this constant drumbeat that cleaned out the low performing staff really made GE production and products (and, by default, GE stock) soar.
Condolences to Jack's family and friends.
6
As one of those GE employees that was there at the end of his tenure and for a few years after, the yearly evaluations were a joke at my level where they were unrelated to the amount of work that needed to be done, and the stress placed on our manufacturing group was only alleviated by senior staff who got out ahead of the curve by providing value to our customers. Six Sigma worked for those groups that wanted to change. And the financial meltdown exposed the financial chicanery and drastically reduced employee savings for those who did not heed the Enron scandal by remaining invested in their employer.
Now I work for people that I respect and like. Much easier to be productive. Easier to be agile. The MBA-ization of the economy has not helped the worker. Some may still have jobs but they have fewer rights and on average have not reaped the benefit of higher productivity. Let's hope, and work for, changing this not very helpful approach to creating a sustainable (healthy) work culture in the US.
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@Ed Yes, it still exists and its stocks did soar. But it is now just a shell company, not unlike Polaroid or, more pointedly, Sunbeam. And what is GE now? God really knows. His lousy business plan created nothing but a holding place for money. No condolences here. He took the American dream and warped it with arrogance, cruelty, and childish epithets.
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@Ed The forced ranking was foolish. What happens when you build a good team, where the weakest link is still better than what you would expect from a new hire?
Plus it creates an internal competition that discourages real teamwork.
3
Mr. Welch was certainly a talented organization builder and many of his management philosophies are still valid and emulated. But he also turned an engineering organization into a financial engineering organization that later came to be the source of much of GE's troubles. Much of the revenue growth came via diworsification and has either already been divested or is in the process of being divested. Perhaps this is all because his successors were not as good as him, but given that many of the methods have been abandoned across multiple industries (customer financing as a major revenue driver anyone?) I doubt that this is the case.
Mr. Welch has a solid legacy that is unattainable for 99.9% of the population, including myself, but some of thst legacy still weighs on the "house that Jack built".
6
The headlines for Mr. Welch are really surprising. In the end GE stock has suffered greatly as it became clear the financial numbers Mr. Welch and subsequent executives put out to the public were manipulated. During Mr. Welch's tenure as CEO Ge revenue increased 385% while its market cap increased by 4000%. GE eventually had to settle accounting fraud charges with the SEC. So as stockholders eventually significantly suffered, Mr. Welch left with the largest severance package ever given and a net worth of over $700 million dollars, not to mention guaranteed use of a personal jet, New York apartment and even baseball tickets for the rest of his life.
Possibly worse of all, to exacerbate and protect his greed, he has been a fervent climate change denier, encouraging the government not to place any restrictions on excessive corporate pollution.
Years ago Mr. Welch was a corporate rock star in business school discussion. Now his name is synonymous with mismanagement, financial reporting manipulation and excessive compensation significantly above what his actual real worth to GE was.
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Too bad GE couldn't have been happy with 2 or 3-fold prosperity and kept on workers who were shed so unceremoniously. The result was ruined lives and destabilized towns, cities, and regions.
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Many pundits during Jack Welch days of leading GE, anointed him as the leading managerial voice and sage of American industry. Welch in retrospect was neither. He basked in this misguided glory for a number of years until a fresh audit of his business contributions were put into proper perspective. Jack Welch was not good for GE long term as his legacy now clearly demonstrates. He deserves every criticism he gets for his complete lack of environmental consciousness. It would be good for future managers to learn from this and to not repeat the mistakes that took a once great American institution to its knees.
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Finally, my GE stock ownership is off the hook for the $200/week grocery allowance (which he was shamed into waiving) in his golden parachute contract!
50
A very bright businessman who took full advantage of our lax tax code to keep GE from paying fair taxes. He'll also have a complex legacy due to polluted waters and GE Capital.
28
Perhaps the most overrated CEO of his time and because of that his influence was very destructive. When he stepped down, Business week looked at GE's performance during his term---it underperformed other manufacturers once you took out the financing operation and that operation also underperformed its peers. His arbitrary approach to firing people made no sense given that some units probably had highly productive staffs and others did not. GE stumbled in terms of product innovation during his time because of cuts to R&D. For all the entrepreneurial rhetoric Welch and his admirers churned ou,t he ultimately was a failure as real entrepreneur. He was a disaster in plain sight but no one had the courage to challenge him, which seems to be a recurring problem with CEOs and the "cult of the CEO" that helped bring on.
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Welch's financialization strategy made him very rich, and inserted rot at the heart of GE from which it has never recovered. Welch's management strategy is largely responsible for the current state of the American economy -- hollow, overfinancialized and on life support from a compliant Fed -- and the replacement of sound corporate governance by Wall Street speculation.
The parable of Lazarus and Dives applies.
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I've been a Schenctadian for 72 years. We put up memorials for Steinmetz, Westinghouse and Edison. There will never be a memorial for Jack Welch in Schenectady. Unless you count the run down section 8 housing that was originally built for a middle class that energized a mid century capitalist economy, or an empty brownfield that was once occupied by a factory building that was torn down because the "hometown company" didn't want to pay its fair share of taxes.
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@Thomas Higgins You are so right. Schenectady, NY and Pittsfield, MA were GE cities, where it was the biggest employer. Welch gutted GE’s presence and left a legacy of two declining cities that have struggled for decades and still haven’t recovered.
21
@Thomas Higgins, the three men you mentioned are why GE is the only company to be the only one to remain on the Dow Industrials from the beginning. Jack Welch's legacy almost cost it that place and still might as GE still struggles with his toxic legacy.
2
The path to financialization of everything and the income inequality we see today started with Jack Welch, his influence and his era.
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To sum it up, what GE did under his leadership affected the American citizens in a negative way one way or other but enriched the GE shareholders and executives in a positive way. After his tenure, all groups were negatively affected. It is a lesson in leadership. Make lives better for all. It will make your legacy live forever.
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@sub And even for GE - "G.E.’s stock price now trades roughly 80 percent below the high it hit in 2000. The company has significantly lower revenue than it did that year. Last year, G.E. reported a loss of $5.4 billion." THAT is how his legacy is written. Not the manipulated PE and stock prices when he was there.
A CEO's TRUE legacy is not known until 20-40 years after his/her tenure.
Just like a POTUS's impact is not known for a while.
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Actually, he did not help stockholders. He ran up stock prices using bad business practices, especially the financial dealings in GE Capital. He also spent a fortune over paying himself another top executives. It all collapsed, leaving stockholders holding the bag in terms of greatly decreased stock prices that may never reach those levels again. He also left a badly damaged company whose core industries may never recover.
2
His tenure, and even this obit, shows how history is re-written [or incompletely written] even so close to the events as they took place. Move forward a few decades, or centuries, and history is just stories with very little in the way of truth and facts.
GE as a company was great - business and profit wise. But during Mr W's tenure it was no different from a cartel and financial manipulator.
70
I worked for a corporation that got one of Jack's number 2's as CEO, Larry Bossidy. As an employee, it was a terrible place to work. Layoffs as part of the yearly business plan, near mandatory overtime and further cuts if financial goals were not met FOR THE QUARTER. On the path to where we are now with a billionaire class and record economic inequality, the Jack Welch management style is a major milestone.
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@JB
One of the founders of my last employer, a tech company, became a Welch golf partner and this led his joining the GE board. We were then subjected to adoption of 6 sigma, top grading, i.e, the elimination for the "bottom" 10%. Former GE employees were hired to implement GE practices. It was laughable and once the rigidity of the GE methodologies were understood we were able to undermine the implementation of these one size fits all tools.
8
His ruthlessness as that "business manager" caused a lot of suffering locally when it had a lot to do with fatally changing a large GE plant's operations. The plant died a slow, painful death, along with people who spent years working for it. The product has been entirely viable in its usefulness and value, but the manufacture here--now gone. Yes, we must move with moving times, but cannot various humane alternative strategies be considered? The "corporate prosperity" was in the sacrosanctness of shareholders, as it was the only consideration in this case. I'm mourning for the dedicated workers who ended up suffering and are gone, not this man.
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Despite his management reputation, my primary memory of him is his messy affair and divorce. Despite the integrity and loyalty he preached in his management activities, his personal morality has had largest impact on my memory of him.
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@Gerry If my memory serves, it was his divorce that brought out the excessive and unprecedented severance package he was given.
10
GE was the kind of company that would infringe on the patents of small players and use their financial heft to win despite being dishonourable. Why isn't that noted?
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20-25 years ago business students were in awe of his philosophy and methods. Today’s students don’t know who he is. He should be studied again for his toxic legacy.
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@Cloud 9
He would be a Great Man if money was the measure of all things. From what I read of his management methods, he was a money making soul killer. He make the fictional Mr. Potter look like a humanitarian.
16
@Cloud 9
I finished an MBA in 2010. I know exactly who he is
3
@KBronson,
Uh, the fictional Mr. Potter is a humanitarian. Jack Welch was a bit of a wizard himself, and one of the greatest deals of the last century was the merging of General Electric and R.C.A.
May he rest in peace, and I have yet to meet a person with some knowledge of the corporate world, regardless of age, who looks blank, or fails to show recognition on hearing of his name.
Fare forward to a great American Tycoon.
2
Mr. Welch presided over General Electric as the EPA fought a long, difficult battle to get GE to clean the chemical contaminant (and possible carcinogen) known as PCBs out of the Hudson River. GE fought tooth and nail to avoid taking responsibility for nearly killing one of the country's great waterways. The long-term ramifications for the health of residents in the Hudson River town of Fort Edward, N.Y., where the GE plant was located, will not be known for many years. The company dumped PCBs (used as a coolant in electrical products) into the Hudson for decades.
So I hope that the "complete obituary" does more than laud his corporate fame and leadership, and assigns responsibility to him for being the last in a long line of GE executives who carried out a protracted court battle to avoid responsibility for the company's actions. Those of us in upstate New York who live near the Hudson River remember Mr. Welch very well, and not fondly.
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@DLM I lived in the area too during that time and also worked for GE.
Just to be clear, GE did also save money expecting they'd lose their court battles, which they did.
I am not defending GE whose "Imagination At Work" failed to imagine keeping my job, but, what GE did regarding dumping was __NOT__ illegal at the time. Governments bear some responsibility in permitting GE to do the dumping. GE got even with the Capital District in a way - they moved Power Systems jobs down to Greenville South Carolina and created Global Research Center jobs in China and India instead of expanding the original Global Research Center (the old "Corporate Research and Development") in Niskayuna.
I never recovered after being laid-off from my GE Power Systems job in 2003 and ultimately had to leave the Capital District because the gas turbine power jobs went away.
30
@VJR Thank you for reading and commenting.
I did some reporting on the Hudson River dredging battle in early 2001 when I was a national correspondent for the Boston Globe; I covered upstate NY for the Globe's national staff. Yes, the dumping was legal at the time, but it was widely believed that GE continued to dump PCBs into the river even after early research strongly suggested that PCBs were carcinogenic. I'm sure that a company like GE had a staff of scientists and attorneys monitoring that situation, and although yes, the company did eventually lose that PCB fight, it very willingly stretched out that battle and cost the U.S. taxpayers untold millions for ... a court fight it very likely realized it would lose!
I've lived in the Albany area for 25 years, and your mixed assessment of GE is very familiar to me. I am sorry for the loss of your job.
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@VJR I’m sick to death of hearing the excuse that the pollution “was not illegal at the time”, also applied to tax avoidance. Of course it wasn’t. GE and other powerful Corporations pay big bucks to lobbyists and politicians to make sure the laws align with their interests. It’s even worse today than during Welch’s tenure.
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It appears that there was also a bit of "accounting" manipulation going on under his reign. His legacy is should be how GE looks today.
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@Roy Exactly, like many of these heroes of business he used accounting tricks to delude investors, who, of course wanted to be deluded. He turned GE into a bad bank with fake profits. It all came apart in 2008.
4